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N2 36 25 Ct; 

LOVELL’S 
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MY JO, JOHN 


HELEN MATHERS 


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I , ■ 


MY JO, JOHN 


t 


4t 


BY 

HELEN MATHERS 

AUTHOR OF 



HEDRI,” “ COMIN’ thro’ THE RYE,” ETC 









NEW YORK 

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY 

150 WORTH ST., COR, MISSION PLACE 




Copyright, 1891, 

BY 

UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY. 
\ 


MY JO, JOHN. 


CHAPTER I. 

“ To make a happy fireside clime. 

For weans and wife : 

That’s the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life.” 

“ Why not separate ? ” said Mrs. Anderson, 
as easily as she might have said, “ Will you 
have another egg ? ” 

Colonel Anderson jumped up from the 
breakfast table as if a gadfly had stung him. 

“Did you say separated he said calmly, 
though his features worked with emotion. 

“ Yes,” said Mrs. Anderson, looking per- 
fectly amiable, “ but while we are about it, 
why not divorce .? ” 


6 


MV JO, /OHI\r. 


“ Why, indeed ? ” he said, with a forlorn 
courage. “ But unfortunately the law does 
not grant a divorce for incompatibility of 
temper, and I’m not aware that I have taken 
to beating you — yet.” 

“ Why don’t you ? ” said Mrs. Anderson, 
coming insultingly close to him, and lifting a 
dimpled chin and rounded cheek in invitation 
to a slap. “ You needn’t hit hard — and then 
I can divorce you ! ” 

Colonel Anderson looked at his wife swift- 
ly, his cheek coloring with shame, as she 
stood there with hands loosely clasped behind 
her smart breakfast-gown, and heart beating 
wildly in her shoes. 

“ So you are afraid,” she said, very low, 
“ yet men find courage to do worse things 
every day of their lives, than box their wives’ 
ears ! ” 

He turned abruptly away from her to the 
window, through which the air blew fresh and 
sweet, as it can do even in Harley Street, 
bringing with it the scent of the flowers that 
filled the boxes, and from where he stood he 
could see the delicate green of the trees in 


MV JO, JOHN. 


7 


Cavendish Square, and he especially noted 
their beauty, as he said to himself : 

“ Has she heard ? Can she know already ? ” 
His silence made her desperate. She 
sharpened her tongue — O ! little rosy cause 
of much evil — like a sword, and does not a 
woman’s tongue always wag the fiercer, and 
cut the deeper, when it is met with a serene 
and passive resistance ? And a woman 
always forgets all the bitter things she has 
said, and is astonished to find that a man 
does not forget them too. 

“ After all,” she said, in a voice that trem- 
bled suspiciously, “ I don’t know that I 
should care about a divorce ! Of course I 
should marry again — and I’m so afraid of 
making a second mistake ! ” 

John Anderson straightened himself up 
suddenly, but made no answer, probably be- 
cause in great crises a man’s sense of humor 
is usually in abeyance, while a woman’s re- 
mains in full force. 

O ! why did he not laugh, turn round and 
box her ears, or kiss her ? A terrible feeling 
that he was slipping away from her, from her 


8 


MV JO, JOHN. 


voice, her influence, her very life, came over 
the poor woman, much as if she were a ship- 
wrecked mariner who sees a ship recede from 
the shore on which he stands. 

“ There must be some reason for this,’’ he 
said at last, and she knew by his voice that 
he was angry, with the unappeasable wrath 
of the sweet-tempered man when he is really 
roused. “ I suppose — you know ? ” 

“Yes, I know,” she said drearily, looking 
at his back, “ and I think that for both our 
sakes we had better separate ! ” 

“ So be it,” he said, and his voice, with a 
curious note of relief in it, sank into her 
heart like a knell. “ I will see my solicitors 
this morning, and the sooner the deed is 
drawn up the better.” 

“ Hadn’t they better draw up one of attach- 
ment at the same time — yourself to Lady 
Blanche } ” said Mrs. Anderson, with poig- 
nant sharpness. 

“ Be kind enough to leave Lady Blanche’s 
name out of this discussion,” said Colonel 
Anderson, sternly. “ What ! are you becom- 
ing a slanderous woman as well as one whom 


MY JO, JOHN. 


9 

no man could dwell with on terms of 
peace?” 

“ How loud you talk J ” she cried, impa- 
tiently and irrelevantly. “We have lived 
together for twenty years, and yet you have 
not got the right pitch of my ears yet ! ” 

“And you have lived with me twenty 
years without understanding me in the least at 
the end of them,” he said, gravely. 

Mrs Anderson blanched for a moment, and 
glanced at the tall, usually slack figure, now 
knit-up and made erect by manly indignation, 
at the usually gentle face, now hardened by 
wounded pride and disappointment, and her 
heart fluttered, while her temper remained 
obdurate as ever. 

“ Lady Blanche's husband is evidently not 
covetous of the peaceful charms of ^er com- 
pany,” she said, untying and tying a ribbon to 
hide the trembling of her hands. “ I wonder 
why other people’s husbands are so much 
more entertaining than one’s own ? Perhaps, 
now we are to be separated, I shall have an 
opportunity — of — finding out ! ” 

Colonel Anderson turned swiftly, and 


lo MV JO, JOHN. 

looked full in the face of the woman who 
had been his happy wife for so long, and 
whom he had only lately discovered to be — 
not perfection. 

“ No, Mary,” he said, “ you will not. Tom 
will see to that. I would rather put up with 
all our late bickerings, and your naggings 
and insulting suspicions, than 

“ Don’t alarm yourself ! ” she interrupted 
him, with a passion entirely past his compre- 
hension. “ I’m much too proud to put my- 
self on a level with you ! All men may do 
as they like, and all women must be good. 
There you have the laws that rule the sexes, 
in a nutshell ! And I despise your sex too 
heartily ever to give one of them a chance of 
making game of me ! ” 

“ If you think so badly of us all, and of me 
in particular,” he said, with dignity, “ I could 
not ask or expect you to put up with my 
company any longer. I spoke in anger when 
I first agreed to a separation, but now, in 
sorrow, and deliberately, I reiterate my con- 
sent. Where there is no trust there can be 
no happiness, and when quarrels come to be 


MV JO, JOHN. 


II 


such a matter of every day and hourly occur- 
rence, as they have become lately, it is far 
better that such cat and dog companionship 
should cease. A man likes a smile and a 
pleasant word when he comes home — ” 

“ Toujoursperdrix!'' said Mrs. Anderson, 
looking fierce and dangerous. “ What do 
you want with smiles at home when you can 
get so many abroad ? ” 

“ I get courtesy, ma’am,” he said, warmly, 
“which I don’t get here, and a welcome— — ” 
“ For which you pay,” said Mrs. Anderson, 
suddenly grown very pale, the little bitter 
core of knowledge in her heart making it for 
the moment almost inhuman. 

He remained perfectly silent and still, and 
ao-ain his silence maddened her. 

o 

“ What an absurd name it is for you, John 
Anderson ! ” she said, in her clear, soft tones, 
while her knees trembled beneath her, “faith- 
ful noble, good John Anderson! ” 

“ And I’ll be shot if your name ought to 
be Mary,” said her husband. “ Mary I what 

a name for a nagging, grumbling, evil-speak- 
• )) 
mg 


12 


MV JO, JOHN. 


“ I am not Lady Blanche, I know,” she 
cried out suddenly, “ but 1 can't help that. 
Only I can relieve you of my presence here. 
Fortunately we have two houses — this and 
Pigeonwick, and I imagine you will give me 
my choice between them.” 

“ Certainly,” he said, in a voice that sounded 
curiously flat after its lately raised tones, 
and he resumed his gaze out of the window. 

“ And 1 choose Pigeonwick,” she said. “ I 
always liked the country, especially at this 
time of year,” (Did the poor woman think how 
it would not be always “this time of year.f^ ”) 
“ I can take Martha, and Fletcher can remain 
with you.” 

“ Certainly,” he said again quietly. 

How easily he fell in with her plans! Yet 
she had proposed them in angry jest and he 
had leaped at the idea, and instantly turned it 
into deadly earnest. 

“ You will of course,” he said, and if he had 
turned his head she must have seen the color 
in his face, “ have your own income. I sup- 
pose that will be sufficient to keep the place 
up on ? ” 


MY JO, JOHN. 


^3 


Mrs. Anderson drew in her breath sharply, 
and stood looking at her husband’s back with 
astonished eyes, as at some unfamiliar sight. 

“ Does she mean to ruin him, too, like the 
other ones ” she said to herself after some 
moments of bewilderment. “ Oh ! this is too 
much ! One would think his sense of shame 
would hold him back ! But let him keep his 
money — it won’t last long, with her pattes de 
mouches in it . . . Oh ! what a shame, what a 
shame ! ” 

'' I have no doubt it will be quite sufficient.’* 
she said, icily. “ Perhaps you would like me 
to pay Tom’s college expenses out of it too.f^ ” 

Colonel Anderson drew a deep breath ; and 
she saw him brace his shoulders suddenly, as 
he answered in a low voice : 

“ If you could manage it — yes.” 

Mary stood quite still, scarcely believing 
her ears. There had never been any talk 
of money between these two, all the years 
of their married life. What had been hers 
was his, and his hers ; and he had written the 
checks, and she had spent as she pleased. 

She drew up her head haughtily — and 


14 


MY JO, JOHN. 


Mary could look very haughty when she 
pleased — and made a gesture, as if she shook 
herself absolutely free from him. 

“ I have no doubt that I could manage it,” 
she said, in a voice so astonishingly unlike 
her own that he turned round to see if indeed 
she was still there; and then she saw the 
shame, the hang-dog look in his face, and a 
boundless scorn for him filled her generous 
soul. 

“ I can put down the carriage,” she said, 
quietly ; “ and Tom must curtail his ‘ wines’ at 
Oxford — and I have no doubt we shall be able 
to manage very well, indeed.” 

He made a movement as if to speak ; then 
checked himself, drank up in one swift com- 
prehensive glance the expressive loathing of 
her face and attitude, then, with bent head, 
and looking absolutely crushed, passed 
out. 

She heard Fletcher in the hall, brushing 
down his master, and making him tidy after 
his usual methodical fashion, knew the exact 
moment that the carefully polished hat was 
handed, heard the great door opened, and, 


MV JO, JOHN, 


15 

from where she stood saw her husband pass 
the window. 

“ That he should come to that — my Jo, 
John !” she said in a whisper, standing in the 
midst of the pleasant room ; then she walked 
directly up to a mirror and looked earnestly 
at herself therein. 

“ I am not tall, like Lady Blanche,” she 
said to herself scornfully, “ I have not ‘ fine 
lengths ’ — as painters say — or, as homely 
people would put it, a figure like a hop-pole, 
that can be draped by art into anything ! 
And I could afford to lose a few pounds — 
but what is gone from me that I used to have 
— something that kept him always beside me, 
and made us both happy, though only when 
it was gone, we knew how happy we had 
been 'I ” 

She glanced round the room. It looked 
unfamiliar, her lips trembled, and a feeling of 
forlornness, vivid as a nightmare of terrified 
loneliness in a strange place, swept over her. 
Bit by bit, and year by year, she had grown 
into the house, and all around her were signs 
of that building in of her life as of a nest, and 


1 6 JO, JO HIST, 

the biggest bit of all, and the most precious, 
was the sweetheart who had just gone out to 
instruct his solicitors to set him free of a 
woman who had tried her hardest to hold 
him back from going to perdition. 

What if, for some time past, she had been 
of uncertain temper and irritating moods 
was it not her very love for him that made 
her so.f^ and if she had been indifferent, 
would it not have meant that her heart had 
ceased to throb with love for him } When a 
woman really loves, she must either say kind 
things to a man, or cruel ones — there is no 
middle way for her in which to hold her 
tongue. 

And she was to turn out from her beloved 
home of many years, leaving him free to 
spend his time and fortune on a woman who 
was notorious for quickly ruining any man 
who surrendered to her his purse-strings. 
Whereupon at the thought of John Ander- 
son’s double ruin, his wife put her soft brown 
head down on the breakfast- table and wept 
bitterly. 


JO, JOHN, 


17 


CHAPTER II. 

“ Unexpected misfortunes are intolerable ; those which are fore^ 
seen are more easily borne.” — Herodotus. 

Colonel Anderson’s feet took him without 
any volition of his own across Cavendish 
Square and up Oxford Street, this not being 
the way he had intended to go at all when he 
set out. 

That refuge of the destitute, to the harried 
or married man, his club, had beckoned him 
with consoling arms as he left home, and some 
wild idea of a “ peg ” had even crossed his 
brain, early in the day though it was, and ab- 
stemious as his habits usually were. 

But, as I have said, he went almost uncon- 
sciously in an opposite direction, and stopped, 
from mere force of habit, before a house in 
Park Street, that looked dull enough to be 
eminently respectable, the more especially as 
Lady Blanche did not at that moment happen 


1 8 MY JO, JOHN. 

to be adorning one of the windows, as she had 
a way of doing when she had a little spare 
time and required something more lively than 
a mirror to give back her charms. 

For she was a woman omnivorous of ad- 
miration, who could appreciate the admiring 
glance of a navvy as heartily as that of a prince, 
and having at all times a “guid conceit o’ her- 
self,” being in that respect the prototype of 
“ the lady with the swelled head,” whom some 
of us know, and whose petty, paltry, eternal 
“ I ” sounds as unceasingly though not half so 
agreeably as the waves on the sea- shore. 

Had her ladyship been visible, Colonel An- 
derson might have dared to knock for admis- 
sion, but as it was, his courage failed him, and 
he pottered instead into the Park, now smart 
and gay with its hyacinth beds of lilac, and 
white, and rose, gorgeously sweet and stiff, and 
liable to destruction in the night from a spite- 
ful parting stab of King Frost. 

The searching sunlight shewed his face wan, 
and growing sharp as a pen, advertised his 
few grey hairs, and found out the wrinkles in 
his clothes, revealing him, in short, as weary 


My JO, JOHN. 


9 


gentleman who had gone bankrupt either in 
mind, body, or estate, and which may be reck- 
oned the worst of these three ills is probably 
the one from which a man happens at that 
precise moment to be suffering. 

“ What’s wrong with Anderson ? ” said 
more than one man to another, as the slightly 
bowed figure moved, without salutation to any 
one, past the early riders in the Row. 

“ Taken up with Lady Blanche, hasn’t he ? ” 
said one of those addressed. “ Poor devil ! 
And such a nice little wife too.” 

“ It’s the ugly wives who keep the men 
straight,” growled out the man addressed ; 
“ take my word for it, if you do meet a man 
walking down Bond Street with his own wife 
instead of another man’s, she is as ugly as 
sin.” 

“ Anderson could never take any care of 
himself, but I never expected him to come a 
cropper that way.” 

H’m ! There’s a deal of quiet obstinacy 
in Anderson. Those easily led men are the 
very devil for taking their own way when they 
have a mind to it. ” 


20 


MY JO, JOHN-. 


“ Well, give me a knave, not a fool, to deal 
with,” said the other, as they separated. “ Y our 
weak, amiable man does more harm than all 
the rogues in creation ; and from the bottom 
of my soul I pity his wife ! ” 

John Anderson was also pitying his wife 
very much as he aimlessly wandered towards 
Knightsbridge, and his self-upbraidings were 
as keen as those of the parson who on first 
appearing in church with his bride, gave out 
as his text “ Behold, I have played the fool, 
and have erred exceedingly ! ” Johh Ander- 
son had played the fool, and the knowledge 
of his folly had been well nigh unbearable 
while he kept it to himself, but now that his 
wife knew it also, and had moreover borne the 
revelation so hardly, there was nothing left to 
fear save the world’s condemnation, for which, 
indeed, he cared not one groat. 

He had not lived for the world, unless, in- 
deed the four walls of his house meant the 
universe, and if Mary were satisfied, he could 
always say with Browning : 


“God’s in His heaven ; all’s well with the world,” 


MY JO, JOHN-. 


21 


but now Mary had deserted him, and the pang 
of that desertion pressed the soldier hard as 
he faced the actual fact in all its naked ugli- 
ness and truth. Desertion — and by a com- 
rade who had kept step for step with him, 
through rain and shine, for close on twenty 
years, through joy and sickness, and good 
times and bad, only to drop away from him 
when the worst time came of all, leaving him 
in the slough of a darksome path, while she 
stepped into the bright light of a smooth 
road, along which she might journey in ease 
and pleasure. 

He scarcely thought of the ingratitude 
shown, and, indeed, in its true sense, there can 
be no ingratitude between man and wife. 

The father knows it when his once supreme- 
ly trusting little child, now grown big and 
forward, stands up and defies him, and sharper 
indeed than the serpent’s tooth is the bite of 
such ungratefulness as Holy Writ assures us 
was suffered by our forefathers thousands 
of years ago even as we suffer it to-day. 

And we bear the hurt silently, knowing that 
in a day to come our children will be pierced 


22 


MY JO, JOHN, 


even as they have pierced us, and we grieve 
for them and know that they will look back 
with unavailing tears, asking forgiveness, per- 
chance, at ears that can no longer hear them. 

John Anderson did not think of all the hap- 
piness he had brought info his wife's life, of 
how the very money he had spoken of as her 
own, was mainly derived from a settlement he 
had made upon her, but only of her haste to 
be rid of him, of her mercilessness to his fault, 
and now that the first smarting of his heart 
wound was over, a sense of injustice moved 
slowly in his mind, and he said to himself that 
if Mary had erred he would have been more 
merciful — and then he stopped abruptly, 
knowing that Mary would never have erred 
so, and relentless self-reproach closed around 
him once more. 

Suddenly his thoughts flew off at a tangent, 
and he fell to wondering how she would get 
on without him. 

Though she took so much care of him, the 
big fellow thought it was he who took care 
of her, and he feared she would miss him, and 
want him, at every turn. 


JO, JOHN. 


23 

He could not imagine her standing alone, 
any more than he could see himself without 
Mary. They had married so young, and been 
so constantly together, that the two lives to- 
gether might be counted as one. 

So he had thought, but lately she had been 
quietly unloosing the bands that held them 
together, and that very morning she had 
boldly and openly struck off the last fetter, 
and declared herself free. 

He knew that she had reason — yet he could 
not kneel to her for forgiveness, knowing the 
wrong he had done her, and that still a greater 
heart than hers might have forgiven, for 
deeper even than his gentleness was John 
Anderson’s pride, and even further down than 
that was the slow obstinacy of which his 
friend had just now spoken. 

So that he never faltered in his intention 
of calling that day on the solicitors who were 
to arrange for the separation, and had indeed 
already selected the firm to whom he should 
go, by no means the one that conducted his 
usual business. 

Suddenly Tom came into his mind — Tom, 


24 MY JO, JOHN. 

who had nearly as much cause for anger and 
resentment as his mother, and who would 
naturally take his mother’s side, whereas, if 
Tom had been a girl, thought John Ander- 
son, wistfully, perhaps she would have stood 
up for her poor old dad, as daughters mostly 
do, and found some sort of excuse for him. 
It would be lonely at Harley Street when 
Mary had gone, and he shivered as he walked 
in the spring sunshine, and found the young 
green overhead crude and harsh, and the blue 
of the sky exasperatingly monotonous and 
bright. 

With the irritability of a sick mind, his 
thoughts flew to Pigeonwick, and by contrast 
with what he actually beheld, there showed 
to him the warm meadow-side where he and 
Mary always went to look for early violets, 
and, vividly fresh, he seemed to smell the 
clear pure scent of the primroses that grew 
in patches in the woods, great clusters that 
sat in the midst of their green leaves as in bas- 
kets, and which Mary often dug up bodily 
and transplanted to her garden. 

But all that was Mary’s now — and this 


JO, JOHN, 


25 

Park was his, to come and go in as he willed, 
with its weeded paths, its costly flower-beds, 
and its smart and shabby crowd, that cared 
nothing for him, and only appraised him by 
his coat, and very little at that. 

A little wind sprung up as he turned out 
of the Park gates, and seemed to hustle him, 
and push him rudely about, and indeed he 
had a sort of half-dressed, half-furnished feel- 
ing about him, and he wondered why it was, 
till he remembered that this was the first time 
for years he had ever come into the Park with- 
out Mary’s hand on his arm. 

He shivered with a sudden sense of mental 
and physical cold, as a man may who, ail en- 
wrapped in the summer warmth of home love, 
finds himself suddenly thrust out into the 
street — alone. 

As he stood waiting to cross the exit from 
the Park, a lady suddenly drew up her “ rats ” 
and accosted him. 

It was Lady Blanche, with a little boy on 
either side of her — no woman ever more sedu- 
lously flaunted the domesticities in the eyes 
of Society than did she — and there was a 


26 JO, JOHN. 

little scorn as well as kindness in the glance 
she flashed upon the tall, sad-faced man. 

“ Did you get my note ? ” she said. “ This 
afternpon, then, at five,” and whirled away, 
leaving folks to wonder why the bare-headed 
chap, gazing after her, seemed to have for- 
gotten to put on his hat. 


my JO, JOHN, 


27 


CHAPTER III. 


“A woman and a windmill are never satisfied.” 

—Spanish Proverb. 

No. 300 Harley Street was not one of those 
fashionable houses in which the master oc- 
cupies the dressing-room, and madame enter- 
tains gentlemen at afternoon tea; nor was 
the one addicted to dining at his club, and 
the other to “ doing” a little dinner and play 
with a friend. The house, in fact, was con- 
ducted more on the lines of a country than a 
town one, and the tone was that of the old 
cavalier in the ballad, who 

“ Kept a brave old house at a bountiful rate, 

And an old porter to relieve the poor at his gate.” 

And who had for wife 

“An old lady whose anger one word assuages, • 

And every quarter paid their old servants their wages.” 

To be sure this description of the pair did 


28 


MV JO, JOHN, 


not exactly apply, but it was certainly a more 
faithful portrait of them than that sketched 
of the old man’s successor : 


“ Like a flourishing young gallant, newly come to his land, 
Who keeps a brace of painted madams at his command, 
And takes up a thousand pound upon his father’s land.” 


While his young wife is 

“A new-fangled lady that is dainty, nice and spare, 

Who never knew what belonged to good housekeeping or care. 
Who buys gaudy -coloured fans to play with wanton air, 

And seven or eight different dressings of other women’s hair.’* 

So that when on a particular evening the 
clock had struck eight, and the Colonel was 
not yet in, something like consternation 
reigned in the kitchen, while apprehension 
sat in state upstairs in the drawing-room. 

Dinner was served at last, and Mary sat 
up to it valiantly, having got over her tears 
in the morning, and made, during the past 
hour, a little resolution that while comforting 
her marvellously did her heart and mind 
credit. 

How dull it was without him ! How en- 
tirely was she at a standstill now she had not 


MV JO, JOHN. 


29 

him to nag at, and nagging with Mary was a 
brand-new accomplishment, and, like all new 
requirements, required to be thoroughly well 
aired while it was fresh ! 

She had lately come near to positively hat- 
ing him, yet she felt to-night how infinitely 
better was his despised presence than his 
empty chair. A little absence will sometimes 
serve a man in kinder stead than whole vol- 
umes of spoken excuses and repentance, and 
an awful thought of how she would probably 
dine alone for the major part of her existence 
(save during Tom’s vacations) took the spring 
out of her figure and the flavor out of the 
food with which Fletcher, wearing an air of 
the deepest reproach, served her. 

When she suggested that something should 
be kept hot for his master, he acquiesced 
with a reserve that said as plainly as possible : 
“You drove him out — how can you expect 
him to return ? ” while his aggrieved eyes 
seemed to ask : “ What have you been doing 
to our youngest child now 1 You have up- 
set him, and he will go without his dinner, 
and be made ill, and really, ma’am, consider- 


30 


MV JO, JOHN. 


ing the life you have led him lately, you had 
ought to be ashamed of yourself ! ” 

“ Our youngest child,” that was the Col- 
onel’s nickname, invented by Mary in a mo- 
ment of hilarity, and the name had stuck to 
him, and the old servants knew of it, and its 
suitability was thoroughly recognised by every 
one throughout the house. 

A born student, he had been thrust, much 
against his will, into the army in early youth 
so that he found himself called upon to dis- 
play those qualities in which Nature had made 
him most conspicuously deficient. 

Alertness, smartness, punctuality — even the 
soldierly quality of flirtation — he had never 
really acquired any one of them ; he had been 
pitchforked into his uniform, and somehow it 
held him up, while the duties of his position 
were gone through nolens -volens, so that it 
was a matter of extreme astonishment to him- 
self, and probably his friends, when, at the 
age of forty-two, he found himself Colonel, 
and left the army on half pay. 

But he had seen plenty of fighting since he 
so unwillingly put on his cadet’s dress, and 


MV JO, JOHN, 


31 

fight he could with a vengeance when his 
blood was up. His gentleness all vanished 
then, and many a deed of heroism had been 
performed by the great fellow, of which he 
thought nothing, but that made Mary’s heart 
throb with pride, and which pushed him for- 
ward in the service at a rate of speed with 
which some of the smartest men in the ser- 
vice could not keep pace. So in comparative- 
ly early middle age he was able to throw 
aside the trappings and habits that he ab- 
horred, and settle down with Mary among 
the books that he loved, books that overflowed 
both the town and country houses between 
which they passed their time very pleasantly, 
and without regard to those fashionable 
periods for migration that governed their 
less fortunate neighbors. 

Probably no one would have called them 
an ideal pair, but they had been a thoroughly 
comfortable one, though neither was aware 
of how entirely indispensable one was to the 
other. And now, after nearly twenty years 
of married life, the thread of their slow- 
winding happii;eg§ had broken off sharp, or 


MY JO, JOHN. 


32 . 

rather, as Mary said to herself, it had been 
cut in twain by her own sharp tongue in less 
than a minute. But could it not be knit to- 
gether again, aye, and so that the joint 
should be neither seen nor felt 

Mary was (that sweetest hall-mark of a no- 
ble mind) forgiving, and when Fletcher had 
finally shut the door on her, with a subdued 
sternness that said he shut her in to her own 
reflections, and much consolation might they 
bring her, she began to make excuses for her 
absent man until gradually all his faults 
dwindled, and were swallowed up in the enor- 
mity of her own. 

Even Lady Blanche receded, and only that 
morning she had seemed to stand there in 
the very flesh between husband and wife ! 
And if a woman ever has any doubt about 
possessing a heart, let her be really jealous. 
Then a long, darting skewer will run through 
a bit of her anatomy, and she will know. 

“ To-day is Friday,” said Mary, absently, 
her eyes wandering round the home-like 
room, in which the very pictures seemed to 
have suddenly put on unfamiliar faces, “ and 


MY JO, JOHN. 


33 

everything always goes wrong with me on a 
Friday. If I die on a Friday respectably in 
my bed, I shall be very much astonished, but 
if I am buried on a Friday, my coffin is sure 
to be a misfit ! ” 

She smiled ruefully, and then took herself 
short up for that smile, for she was matronly 
in her way, very matronly indeed for thirty- 
eight, which is only the age of a gay young 
frisker, as married women now-a-days go. 
Only Mary did not frisk, possessed no curl- 
ing-tongs, and made home her hobby, and if 
she sometimes looked approvingly at a smart 
man, only did so wistfully, wishing that she 
could make her husband smart and well set- 
up also. But, alas ! once released from mar- 
tial restraints and the vigilance of an army 
tailor. Colonel Anderson subsided into one 
of those well-clad, but ill-knit figures, that 
have always the appearance of wanting 
stitches taken up everywhere, and gradually 
it became his wife’s and Fletcher’s incessant 
care to make him look respectable, and try 
their level best to keep him so. 

Somehow his cravats always would gravi- 


JO, JOHN. 


34 

tate to one side, his collar-stud invariably re- 
volted and gave way, the polish disappeared 
from his hat when not a drop of rain was fall- 
ing, and a mysterious dust collected over his 
clothes, perhaps from the book-stalls over 
which he might often be found poring, and 
whence he brought home large volumes lov- 
ingly hugged up to his breast. 

“ It ain’t no good,” soliloquised Fletcher 
dejectedly, one day when, having brushed up 
his absent-minded master to the last point of 
respectability, he watched him down the 
street, “ he’s just like a baby, wash him up, 
dress him, make him as nice as a new pin — 
and down he sits and makes mud-pies — 
bless him ! ” he added, fervently, with that ac- 
cent of loyal devotion used by most people 
in speaking of John Anderson. 

Mary thought of his little faults and weak- 
nesses, and of how lovable he was with them 
all, as she sat twisting her wedding keeper 
round and round the finger that had certain- 
ly got a little thinner during the past weeks. 

Very few women wear keepers now ; is it 
because a wedding-ring is a mere accidental 


MV JO, JOHN. 


35 


thing, and liable to slip off at a moment’s 
opportunity, or because there is so little to 
keep, or nothing much worth keeping ? 

She thought of the gradual change that 
had come over him of late, of how easily she 
had discovered that he was hiding something 
from her of which he was both sorry and 
ashamed, so that often he found it impossible 
to meet her eyes with those blue ones of his, 
that were usually guileless as a child’s. 

Tom used to say that to draw his father’s 
attention to outside matters when he was en- 
gaged in abstruse meditation was like watch- 
ing the dawn of reason in the eyes of a 
baby ; first a gleam, then a slow wavering 
light, then partial comprehension, and finally 
a satisfied and clear awakening. 

This absence of mind made him peculiarly 
liable to imposture of all descriptions, and 
Mary viewed his occasional visits to the City 
with the deepest mistrust, for if he did get 
an idea, poor innocent, it was pretty sure to 
be a wrong one, and tolerably certain to 
bring him to grief. These visits, however, 
had lately been entirely overlooked in Mary’s 


MV JO JOHN, 


36 

dumfoundered amazement at one day find- 
ing him tucked comfortably into Lady 
Blanche Jessup’s ingle-nook, a cup of tea in 
one hand, a piece of muffin in the other, and 
upon his comely face a look of complete sat- 
isfaction such as latterly it had never worn 
at home. 

“ John ! ” she gasped, but the deluded man 
had not even the grace to seem ashamed of 
himself, and presently she found that this 
dropping- in process had been going on a 
considerable time, and in telling her Lady 
Blanche had laughed — not triumphantly, but 
as if she were intensely amused at either 
husband or wife — possibly both. 

And one or two men standing about — the 
usual cut of Lady Blanche’s men, which 
John Anderson was not — had smiled, and 
then been ashamed of themselves, seeing the 
color rise in the cheeks, and tears in the eyes 
of the dear little woman to whom Colonel 
Anderson evidently belonged by law. 

But afterwards when Mary, grieved and 
hurt, had asked him why he could not come 
home to drink his tea with her as usual, he 


MY JO, JOHN. 


37 

had actually informed her that he found 
Lady Blanche’s chimney-corner a nice, cosy, 
soft nest to creep into occasionally, that 
there he got smiles and pleasant words, for 
she had a knack of making a man thorough- 
ly comfortable. 

Mary had smiled a little bitterly at this. 

O, yes ! No doubt Lady Blanche had 
warmed many a man at that ingle-nook, and 
not cold men, or hungry men either, but rich 
men, easy men, who were only too pleased 
to supply the many costly wants of the tall, 
black-eyed woman, who knew how to make a 
pet of, and put on good terms with himself 
any man on earth — every man save her hus- 
band ! 

Lady Blanche was a bit of a gambler on 
the Stock Exchange, and occasionally carried 
on some exceedingly risky operations, in 
which, or report lied, she lost none of her 
own, and a great deal of her friends’ money, 
and Mary, though not at all conversant with 
current chroniques scandaleuses, was aware 
of this, and knew that her husband’s pocket 
stood in equal danger with his heart. 


38 MY JO, JOHN, 

And she naturally disliked and mistrusted 
this emphatically nineteenth century woman, 
with whom she had never been on terms of 
more than slight acquaintance, and with 
whom she had not an idea or taste in com- 
mon ; while no doubt from the bottom of her 
soul the other despised one who could be 
perfectly charming and lovable, but never by 
any possibility “ smart,” that word of magic 
which covers with its aegis every mad, wicked, 
and outrageous act that a woman now-a- 
days can commit. And in thinking of her 
to-night, Mary could not imagine where 
the attraction in her lay for John Ander- 
son. 

Long as she had looked into that simple, 
sincere, faithful soul, she had found only rev- 
erence for good women and pity, but no con- 
tempt for bad ones, and so far as she could 
tell, only two human figures had loomed 
large through the abstraction in which he 
lived and they were herself and their only 
surviving son, Tom. 

Tom ! The thought of him struck Mary 
suddenly as of some one she had forgotten to 


MV JO, JOHN, 


39 


reckon with — wliat would he say, what expla- 
nation could she make that would not cover 
her with ridicule or, on the other hand, hold 
his father up to that sweeping condemnation 
which only youth knows adequately how to 
feel or express for the faults of its elders ? 
And then she consoled herself by thinking 
that Tom would never know, of course ; this 
quarrel, the first big one of over twenty-years 
of married life, would all be done with before 
to-morrow morning, and she and John would 
kiss each other, and perhaps love each other 
better than ever, for in her heart she did not, 
could not believe he loved Lady Blanche, 
and his sternness that morning had worn as 
much the livery of innocence as guilt. 

She lingered so long over her thoughts, 
where she sat, dreading to face the empty 
drawing-room upstairs, that Fletcher, who 
had preserved a lofty air of injury below 
stairs, given vent to various oracular utter- 
ances, carefully in the plural, about women 
and their “ strange ” ways, brought coffee to 
her there, and the letters that had come by 
the evening post She looked up with a 


40 


MY JO, JOHN. 


smile as the man came in, a smile that in his 
heart he thought most unbecoming under 
the circumstances, and which he met with a 
severe expression of disapproval. 

It was just like a woman he thought, to 
drive a man out, and then alter all her usual 
habits because she could not support life 
without his company — exactly like a woman 
— like his own wife, for instance. 

Mary took a sip of coffee, glancing unin- 
terestedly at the letters that lay on the white 
cloth, than gave a cry of pleasure, for there 
was one from Tom, and several obvious cards 
of invitation, and one other letter that imme- 
diately fascinated her attention, there was 
such an air of business, legal business, about 
it. 

What possible business could there be for 
any one to write to her about } And she 
knew even less of business than the “ young- 
est child.” 

There was a fatherly old lawyer who at- 
tended to all the money affairs of these two 
babes in the wood, and managed indeed very 
excellently for them, and if he ever wrote, it ^ 


MV JO, JOHN, 


41 


was to the husband, not the wife, and this 
was not his handwriting. 

And John had said that morning, he was 
going to his solicitors . . . she repeated the 
words over in a strange little whisper to her- 
self, and this letter was not from them . . . 
what could it be ? She stretched her hand 
out at last, and took it. As she read its con- 
tents, a horrible, creeping feeling seemed to 
stir though her brain, and a coldness as of 
death numbed her fingers and spread up- 
wards to her heart. She read it once, know- 
ing what it was, but not understanding. She 
read it a second time without believing what 
it said, then came complete comprehension, 
and she sat as one who no longer breathed, 
frozen in her place. 

It was from a firm of lawyers whose name 
she had never heard, and it was very short, 
very much to the purpose, and almost brutal 
in its plainness. 

It said that Colonel Anderson had that day 
requested them to draw up a deed of separa- 
tion between him and his wife, by which her 
own income and Pigeonwick were to be hers, 


42 JO, JOHM. 

for her separate use and maintenance, out of 
which were to be defrayed the expenses of 
Mr. Tom Anderson, now at Oxford. That 
the house in Harley Street, with its contents, 
save such things as actually belonged to her- 
self, were to belong solely to the Colonel, also 
his income from half-pay, and all private 
property whatsoever. Such servants as she 
required, Mrs. Anderson was desired to select, 
and take with her to Pigeonwick, and finally 
she was courteously desired to make all her 
arrangements as speedily as possible, as Col- 
onel Anderson had arranged tc go abroad 
immediately. 

Oh ! with what cruel, what indecent haste 
was he hurrying to be rid of her, giving 
not even time to her in which to draw 
breath ! 

The humble words of prayer for forgiveness 
that had trembled all that day on Mary’s lips 
were driven back and choked by the deep 
burning sense of injustice succeeding that 
first speechless anguish in her soul. . . .would 
he have dared to turn even a servant out so 
abruptly, without giving her a chance of 


My JO, JOHN. 43 

begging forgiveness for the fault she had 
committed ? 

But a wife is an upper servant who cannot 
even claim the right of giving or receiving a 
month’s warning, who has no wages, no per- 
quisites, and is never expected to be ill, or 
cross or unfit for her duties from year’s end 
to year’s end. 

Mary had for some time ceased to tremble, 
and now she rose up and walked, with the 
dignity that sometimes comes with a great 
calamity, upstairs. 

It seemed to her that she stayed for hours 
upon hours in the dainty rooms, sweet with 
flowers and gay with the many gleanings of 
a delightful taste, and the treasures that ac- 
cumulate naturally in a house that has been 
dwelled in many years. 

There hung his portrait, as good-looking 
and sweet-tempered a young fellow then as 
ever wore the uniform of the “ Pinks.” Yonder 
were the miniatures of the children who had 
died, and of the little girl, over whose death 
John had grieved most of all, and a lock of 
whose hair he wore always next his heart. 


44 


Afy JO, JOHN. 


Mary looked at them all, with that proud 
anger still in her breast, and Lady Blanche’s 
face very clear and distinct before her, and 
when at last she w^ent upstairs, she was proud 
and angry and irreconcilable still, and it was 
with a sense of relief that, missing her maid, 
Mrs. Fletcher, she remembered she had given 
the woman a holiday to go into the country 
to see her child, remaining until the next 
day. 

When she had got into her dressing-gown, 
and was brushing out her abundant, curly 
brown hair, she suddenly heard some one 
moving softly in the adjoining dressing-room, 
and stood still, with beating heart to listen. 

It was not John, but Fletcher. 

She opened the door partly, and called to 
him. 

“ What are you doing, Fletcher ” she 
said. 

“ I have had a telegram from master, 
ma’am, saying he would be very late, and I 
had better prepare the dressing-room for him 
to-night.” 

She shut the door softly, and went back. 


JO, JOHN, 


45 


CHAPTER IV. 

“Put a stop to our suspicions with which we babble against each 
other, and blend us with the balsam of friendship.” 

Aristophanes. 

It was two o’clock in the morning, and 
Mary was standing by the half-opened window, 
listening to the last echoes of the night traffic 
dying away. 

She was sorry when it ceased, for, all alone 
in body and spirit as she was, the hum and 
movement, the life that beat in such full 
current without, insensibly soothed her, and 
when the last sound had ceased, her ears 
ached with listening for more. 

She knew now that her wicked, passionate 
words that morning were not to blame for 
the judgment that had fallen upon her. 

True she had flown in the face of Provi- 
dence, and Providence, if it does sometimes 
seem to smile at your folly and lead you on 


MY JO, JOHN. 


46 

to worse errors, mostly slaps you soundly in 
the face before it has done, and she richly de- 
served a lesson, but not such punishment as 
this. 

One of the ancients urges that a man shall 
not be hanged for a fault that only requires 
a whipping, and Mary knew that something 
far deeper than mere exasperation at her 
temper had made John Anderson take her 
at her word, and bind her to her own decision 
with such cruel swiftness. 

He loved the other woman so much that 
he could not make a pretence even of tolera- 
ting his wife, and was resolved to go to the 
devil his own way, obstinate foolish mortal 
that he was, but was it not her duty to drag 
him out of danger, just as one would save a 
child who blundered headlong into it } 

Should a good woman leave a man for a 
single fault — a fault to which his whole stain- 
less life gave the lie.^ No, no, a thousand 
times no! It is a woman’s noblest mission 
to forgive, and forgive she must and will even 
unto seventy times seven if she be worthy of 
the name. 


MY JO, JOHN, 


47 


“ For better, for worse.” She repeated the 
words over to herself, and if a wife deserted 
husband, or husband wife, when either most 
needed a strong arm to save, then the marri- 
age service was null and void, and the vows 
deliberately made were deliberately broken. 

She would not stand on the bank and see 
him drown before her eyes, sucked into the 
whirlpool of Lady Blanche’s cast-off, ruined 
lovers. She would plead with him, she would 
pray him for Tom’s sake as well as her own to 
overcome this worse than folly, and return to 
her, and the company of those beloved books, 
which he had of late so entirely neglected. 

And no greater proof of the utter upheaval 
of his life could have been found than in this 
total abstention from his one luxury, just as 
Mary’s irritable ways and sharp tongue were 
an altogether new departure from her usually 
sweet, reasonable ways ; but he must love her 
— O ! yes ! he could not so quickly unlearn 
the lesson of over twenty years. . . . 

How she repented now of her temper, 
how she longed to call back every unkind 
word she bad spoken ; and all the memories 


MV JO, JOHN. 


48 

that bind a good woman to the husband of 
her youth thronged about her, and cried out 
to her with her dead children’s voices, and 
seemed to touch her with the cherub hands 
that had faltered and slipped all too soon 
away from him and from her. 

She paused before her dressing-case, and, 
almost without thinking, pulled out the secret 
drawer, and drew from it a packet of letters 
that had lain there many years. 

She untied the ribbon, and they fell apart, 
showing the writing here and there. The 
first that she took into her hand commenced 
“ My little one,” and she laid it down, and 
looked at the next, beginning “ My little 
beauty,” and so on to another with “ My little 
darling,” at its head, and then she glanced at 
the signatures, which were one and all simply, 
“ Your Jo, John.” 

“ Littlel' she said to herself, as she stood 
glancing through them, “ that is the ruling 
idea, that is always a man’s idea of what is lov- 
able and sweet, that is why many a man who 
is satisfied with his wife, yet turns his head to 
admire the beauty of some little face — a girl’s 


MV JO, JOHN. 


49 


face — that is why he ceases to pay so many 
compliments to his wife as she grows older, 
because she has grown bigger, and her face 
has broadened out — it is the little one that 
he fancies, and remembers. 

“ And I have grown middle-aged, and am 
too plump — that is the only fault he ever used 
to find with me — and I don’t please his taste 
any longer. It’s odd that the untidy, clothes- 
horse sort of men are usually better judges 
of women and more fastidious in their taste 
than the well set-up fellows who love their 
looking-glasses better than their souls! ” 
There was no sound now in the street 
below, save some steps that at regular inter- 
vals passed the house, and seemed to come 
back again, then again return, and she said 
to herself idly it must be the policeman on 
his beat, and she was glad he stayed so near. 

But presently the steps ceased altogether, 
and not long afterwards Mary heard a move- 
ment in the next room, and her heart bounded, 
for she knew that it was John. 

She stood looking at the closed door that 
suddenly struck her as an offence to herself, 
4 


50 


MV JO, JOHN. 


for had he not practically ordered Fletcher to 
shut it ? 

Why was it shut ? What had she done 
that it should be closed upon her ? Then 
love conquered pride, and she took one timid 
step forward — only one — and in the same 
moment heard the key turn in the lock. 

Then indeed Mary forgot to be good, and 
soared high on a wave of passion and wounded 
pride, that when it had spent itself in dumb 
fury left her shocked and ashamed at her own 
capacity for evil, and yet for all her shame so 
hardened that no power on earth would have 
induced her now to take another single step 
towards reconciliation. 

Locked out of his heart, locked out of his 
room, as though she were a guilty creature, 
a thing accursed, when she had tried with 
all her strength to put self by and do her 
duty. . . 

Cold and calm she extinguished the light, 
and laid her down to sleep. 

Morning found her sleepless, but still calm, 
for now pride had so entirely encased her 
heart that it was beyond the possibility of 
pain to wound it 


MV JO, JOHN, 


51 


CHAPTER V. 

“Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may 
hear from others twice as much as we speak.” 

— Eipctetus. 

Martha Fletcher was brushing out her 
mistress's hair before the mirror, and glanc- 
ing from time to time at the pale, composed 
face before her. 

She had returned early in the day, and to 
her astonishment found Mrs. Anderson not yet 
down, though that lady had long ago taken 
her breakfast in bed, and was moving about 
her room putting things together here and 
there, either as if she meant to re-arrange 
them, or to take a journey. 

Fletcher had not condescended to enlighten 
his wife as to the state of affairs. 

Between this pair had waged ever since 
their marriage (Martha had been maid to 
Mary for twenty years, Fletcher valet to his 


JO, JOHN. 


52 

master for about the same time, and they had 
married from sheer propinquity) a never end- 
ing duel as to which should be master, and 
after ten steady years of quietly vigorous 
efforts on both sides, they were wary com- 
batants still — and stood even. 

Mary, secure in her own happiness, had 
watched with varying emotions the tactics of 
the opposing parties, but concern had at last 
given place to an intense amusement that she 
often shared with Tom, whispering into his ear 
any particularly diverting skirmish between 
the pair reported to her by Martha. 

True, Fletcher had the great advantage of 
being a man, and therefore superior to nerves, 
and a thousand feminine weaknesses, but on 
the other hand Martha was much sharper of 
wit and more agile of tongue (naturally), so 
that often she got the advantage of him, 
though his inpenetrable front did not suffer 
her fully to enjoy the fruits of victory. 

Martha did not flirt, did not live to dress, 
and consequently had plenty of spare time in 
which to walk about, and talk — talk to a man 


MV JO, JOHN, 53 

who seldom or never answered her. There 
lay the sting — if only he would talk too ! 

A woman of Martha’s class usually talks 
about 2^ man before she is married, and at him 
afterwards, and if she pens all her grievances 
up in her throat, they eat inwards to her 
heart like a moral cancer that in time will 
kill her, but a man does not recognize the 
healthfulness of such a safety-valve ; he curses 
only her garrulousness, and does not feel 
enough (as a rule) to want to talk about it, 
or think enough to do himself an injury. 
And Fletcher profoundly despised women. 
He had gone so far as to tell his wife on one 
occasion that . for his part he considered he 
and master got on much better as bachelors, 
while she and her mistress were away, than 
when they were both at home. 

Mary had laughed, and always took Flet- 
cher’s part when Martha railed about him, 
knowing that the little woman really adored 
him with all her heart. 

Only she would not be mastered, Martha 
was resolved on that point. Why should she } 
She was every bit as good as he was — and 


MY JO, JOHN. 


54 

better. Certainly she never bore any malice, 
and you can always trust a woman who bangs 
a door in a rage, but beware of the one who 
goes out quietly and squeezes the door han- 
dle. 

“ I don’t understand the men,” Martha 
would say, rolling her nice round arms up in 
her pink cotton sleeves, “ I can’t make them 
out, ma’am, and that’s the truth.” 

And she would adduce such a long list of 
men who made their wives’ lives a misery to 
them, till Mary would come to the conclusion 
that it must be true, only she had the one ex- 
ception to the rule. 

Weak indeed, she knew John to be, but 
lovable as all weak things are, and probably 
the men who get the best sort of love from 
women, the divinest and noblest and most en- 
during, are those who arouse the protective 
instinct in a woman’s mind. It is by no 
means the best sort of woman who makes a 
good slave and follows blindly her leader. 

Martha’s bosom was this morning evidently 
bursting with a grievance, and presently out 
it came. 


MV /O, JOHN. 


55 


“What do you think, ma’am?” she said, 
as she began to pile Mary’s hair up, “ I’d 
hardly got into the house, when Fletcher told 
me that he knew me by my waddle right 
from the other end of the street. As if such 
a scare-crow of a man oughtn’t to be thank- 
ful to have married something comfortable. 
Dear me, how these tall, thin people do fancy 
themselves ! ” 

Mary smiled faintly as she looked at the 
two reflections in the glass. 

Mistress and maid were both brown-haired 
blue-eyed, beautifully-complexioned, both were 
round and soft and cosy-looking, but Mary 
was the taller by at least three inches. Both 
were domesticated women, with no interests 
whatever save home ones, and each had an 
only child whom she adored, and was a mother 
to the heart’s core. 

Tom was nearly always away, and little 
Molly lived in the country with her grand- 
parents, but mistress and maid often talked 
of their children together, and were thoroughly 
good friends at all points. 

“ Martha,” she said, suddenly, “ would you 


MV JO, JOHN. 


56 

mind being away from Fletcher for — for a 
time?" 

Martha started, and looked apprehensively 
in the glass. 

“ You’re not going to send him away 
Ma’am, are you ? ’’ she said, the corners of 
her mouth falling, “ he’s got his faults I know, 
but he is a good servant, and serves you and 
master faithfully." 

“ Especially his master," said Mary, grave 
and pale. “No, I have no idea of his leaving 
his master. But I am going to Pigeonwick, 
Martha, for an indefinite time" (her blue eyes 
met the other astonished blue ones in the 
glass), “and I should want to take you with 
me, and of course your master could not do 
without Fletcher.’’ 

Martha went on mechanically andblunder- 
ingly putting in hairpins. 

Her mind was in a whirl, her thoughts 
were chaos — it was natural enough to her to 
live with Fletcher on the terms she did, but 
a quarrel between her master and mistress- 
one that entailed a division of household and 
dwelling-place — she thought she must be 


MY JO, JOHN, 


57 


dreaming till her eyes fastened on the stern- 
ness of Mary’s face, and then real concern 
moved her. 

“ Ma’am,” she said, “ you’re not angry with 
master, are you ? And him so helpless and 
almost as if he was a baby, looking to you and 
depending on you for everything ! Why he’s 
just lost without you, and goodness knows 
where he’d wander if he hadn’t got you to 
come home to ! ” 

“ He has wandered far enough while I am 
here,” thought Mary, bitterly, but aloud she 
said, “ and I am going as soon as possible. 
Indeed, I have set my heart on going within 
three days : so you must work hard, Martha, 
and I will help you to pack up.” 

Martha rolled a bewildered eye round the 
pretty room, then sighed hopelessly, as if 
Mary had talked of packing up and remov- 
ing the world, and said, “ You mean, ma’am, 
just your linen and clothes as usual ” 

“ No — I mean everything — everything that 
is mine, but nothing, remember, Martha, 
nothing, not a stick or atom of anything be- 
longing to Colonel Anderson.” 


58 


MV JO, JOHN. 


She had risen, and as she turned, faced that 
shut door, which mutely proclaimed her dis- 
grace (but the key of which was now on her 
own side), and her soft mouth hardened as 
she looked at it. 

“ Of course, Martha,” she said, “you can re- 
main here if you can’t bear to leave Fletcher 
— but if so, you would have to cook for your 
master. In that case I should take the cook 
and Polly with me!' 

“ As if I should leave you, ma’am,” said 
Martha indignantly, and thinking that, after 
all, this would probably blow over in no 
time, and everything be comfortable as before; 
“ and the place will be looking lovely now ; 
and you haven’t been well lately, ma’am, and 
the change will do you good.” 

Mary did not seem to hear her ; she was 
looking at a row of miniatures that she had 
unhooked from the wall, and that now lay on 
a table near. 

Those little golden heads, all gone, how she 
had longed once to put weights on them to 
keep them down, because she thought they 
would grow up too fast, and slip away from 


MV JO, JOHN. 


59 

her, and God had decreed that they should 
never grow up or sin, or suffer, but be al- 
ways her own little children clinging to her 
with little warm loving ways that now she 
must forever go cold without. 

Only Tom was left. Tom, whom year 
after year she watched, reckoning each day as 
one more in which he was granted to her, yet 
seeing always his dead face lying in the coffin, 
as one after the other she had seen the rest. 

Probably she could never have brought her- 
self to think or say as our own Princess Alice 
so nobly did when her child met his most 
cruel death, — “that she only thanked God 
for having spared him to her so long,” but 
she blessed Heaven every day for leaving her 
yet a mother. 

Martha came near and looked over her 
mistress’s shoulder. 

“ Do you remember, ma’am,” she said, “ how 
when Miss Dolly lay in her little coffin, mas- 
ter lifted you out of your bed and carried you 
to her side that you might lay the flowers 
about her pretty face ? ” 

Mary did not stir. 


MV JO, JOHN. 


bo 

“ And how Master Duckie, when he was 
dying — so strong he was for all the fever — 
put out his hand, and pushed one of your 
hairpins back into place, when you were lean- 
ing over him ? ” 

Mary turned abruptly away, her hands 
clenched, and a spasm of mortal agony con- 
vulsing her features. 

Did she not remember.? Oh God ! And she 
would not remember . . . She had work to do, 
and it must be done quickly, or not at all. 

“ And now, Martha,” she said quietly, “ we 
will begin to pack.” 


MY JO, JOHN, 




CHAPTER VI. 


“ We certainly ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or 
household goods, which, when worn out with use, we throw 
away ; and were it only to learn benevolence to human kind, we 
should be merciful to other creatures.” Plutarch. 

“What is the meaning of it all?” said 
Martha, as she shut herself smartly into that 
temple devoted to silver, glass, and such-like, 
which Fletcher looked upon as his special 
sanctum, and in which he hated to be dis- 
turbed. 

“ Matter ? ” said Fletcher, with a snarl, as he 
lifted his bald head and tall thin person from 
over the silver spoons he was rubbing furi- 
ously — “ it means that missus has just worn 
master’s patience out at last, and he’s made 
up his mind to live by hisself — small blame 
to him.” 

This was only a guess, and he looked 
keenly at Martha to see if he were correct. 

“ Pooh ! ” said Martha, taking a seat with 
an air that meant aggravation. “ It’s missus 


62 


MV JO, JOHN. 


won’t stay with him, you mean. A nice poor 
stick he’d be without her to bolster him up ! 
But what’s he been doing, I wonder ? I 
shouldn’t have thought he’d got spirit enough 
to get into a scrape ! ” 

Fletcher snorted violently, nodding his 
head up and down, and at the same time con- 
triving to shake it, in a peculiarly irritating 
manner. 

You needn’t look like a fool, if you are 
one,” said Martha, comfortably, “ and if you 
think you’ll be able to do anything with mas- 
ter, keep him tidy, or happy when missus is 
gone, you’re mistaken. You’ll just be two 
doddering old fools, trying to prop each other 
up, and both coming to the ground.” 

Fletcher laughed shortly, and flew at a 
silver tankard, expending upon it an enor- 
mous amount of superfluous elbow-grease. 

“ Those baggages in the kitchen don’t 
know anything about it } ” said Martha, with a 
sudden change of tone. 

“Who’s to tell ’em.? ” said Fletcher, scorn- 
fully, “ unless it’s you or me .? And can’t 
missus go to her country house on a visit 
without folks talking .? Our family ain’t none 


JO, JOHN. 63 

of those wretched fashionable folk as lives for 
society, and that rot — and you had better take 
Cook and leave Polly. Polly and me can 
manage quite comfortable for master.” 

“Can you.?” said Martha, fiercely, and 
growing extremely red. She would never 
admit it, but she was really intensely jealous of 
Fletcher, and greatly overrated the charms of 
his elegant manners (upstairs) and decidedly 
distinguished, appearance. 

And Polly was one of those jades to whom 
Providence gives dimples, and nothing else — 
and uncommonly well do they seem to thrive 
on them ! 

“ Missus will have to decide that,” she said, 
after a considerable pause, “ and I shouldn’t 
be surprised if she takes Polly as housemaid, 
and engages a new cook to go to the Wick. 
You haven’t even asked how Kitty is.?” she 
added in an aggrieved voice, 

“ How is she .? ” said Fletcher, in whom the 
paternal feelings were not at all strongly de- 
veloped. 

“ As pretty as paint.” 

“ That’s all you women think about. 
How’s her temper .? That’s more to the point.” 


64 


JO, JOHN, 


“Well,” said Martha judiciously, “her 
temper ain’t up to her looks, and that’s a 
fact But girls always take after their fathers. 
But she sleeps well and eats well — like you 
— she hasn’t got brain enough for it to give 
her much trouble. Now there’s Master Tom 
see how bright and lively he is — just like his 
mother ! He don’t want dry-nursing, and 
when he does get a wife I believe he’ll know 
how to behave to her ! ” 

“ That’ll depend on who he marries,” said 
Fletcher, still wrestling with his chamois 
leather. 

“ But come now,” said Martha, who was as 
really anxious to get at the rights of the 
matter as Fletcher was secretly anxious to 
know what Mrs. Anderson had been doing 
upstairs all day, “ everything was all right 
when I went down to Kitty the day before 
yesterday, what has happened since ? ” 

“ Things has come to a p’int,” said Fletcher 
oracularly. “ It’s been nag, nag, grumble, 
grumble, worrit, worrit, at that blessed man 
for weeks, and yesterday morning at break- 
fast, goodness knows for what or why, she 
right down upsets the applecart, and tells 
him as how she is going ! ” 


MY JO, JOHN. 55 

“ You heard ? ” said Martha, with a snif- 
fing air, peculiarly offensive. 

“ I ain’t deaf,” said Fletcher, with dignity, 
“and I don’t carry wax in my pocket to stop 
my ears with when individuals talk high, and 
I was brushing master’s coat and hat out- 
side. When he came out, he was all trem- 
bling, and looked as white and weary as if 
hed been a brute ’stead of her, and he went 
down the street hardly looking where he put 
his feet down. Poor thing! ” added Fletcher, 
with a tremble in his voice that a wrathful 
thought soon steadied. 

“And would you believe it.?” he said, 
holding out a silver fish-slice as if it were a 
musket, “ that when he never came home to 
dinner, she had the face to wonder where he 
was, and ackshally waited for him ! Then 
she had the owdacity to tell me to ask the 
cook if she hadn’t better keep something hot 
for him I Hot ! as if she hadn’t made every- 
thing hot enough for him for one day I I 
didn’t even answer her, Martha, I Just walked 
out with indignity ! ” 

And so saying, with an air of nobility that 
would have done credit to an Italian prince, 

5 


66 


MY JO, JOHN. 


Fletcher resumed his plebeian occupa- 
tion. 

Martha laughed — not unkindly — but Flet- 
cher felt less morally elevated after that 
laugh than before, so he went on talking in 
case she should think that she had scored 
one over him. 

“ Then he sends me a wire to get his dress- 
ing-room ready — says he’ll be late. Late 
indeed he was — but not at his club. For 
hours he walked up and down, up and down 
the street, though 1 begged him to come in, 
and told him missis had been in bed ever 
since eleven.” 

Fletcher paused and chucked his head sar- 
donically. 

“Just to think of it,” he said. “ Him as 
has done such deeds, and the bravest of the 
brave — afraid to set foot in his own house 
because of a woman’s tongue ! ” 

Martha’s face was very grave now, with all 
the aggravation gone out of it. 

“ Has he been up to see missis this morn- 
ing } ” she said. 

Fletcher shook his head. 

“ He breakfasted by hisself,” he said, “ or 


MV JO, JOHN, 


67 

leastways, pretended to. And in the midst 
of it down conies Polly and says, ‘ If you 
please, sir, my mistress says she is lunching 
and dining out to-day, and will you please to 
have yours at your club ? ’ Cool ! To order 
a man out of his own house to get his 
victuals ! He just turns very white and says, 
‘ Very well.’ And I’ll tell you what it is, 
Martha— if ever a woman went and throwed 
her cap over the mill, throwed it farther than 
she’ll ever pick it up again, it’s that mistress 
of yours upstairs, that you’ve thought all the 
world of, and who ain’t one pin better than 
the rest of your most perverting and aggera- 
wating sex.” 

But Martha, having found out all she 
wanted to know, while withholding her own 
information, had slapped the door to in his 
face before he got to the end of his sentence. 


68 


MY JO, JOHN, 


CHAPTER VII. 

Take nane frae Peter, nor frae Paul ; 

Nane frae high or low o’ them all ; 

And frae them all ye will tak’ nane, 

Until it comes from the bride’s ae hand.” 

The division of household goods, of prop- 
erty that had hitherto been supposed to be 
common to husband and wife, had begun, 
and as the work went on, the division too of 
memories, of interests and blended lives was 
with fell and almost breathless rapidity made 
complete. 

Not one iota of anything belonging to 
her husband might Mary take with her — such 
was the edict promulgated by his solicitors, 
and no scrap of anything belonging to Mary 
might she leave behind her, or anything be- 
longing to Tom, who was henceforth to be 
practically fatherless so far as the finality of 
all present arrangements went. 

All that^was her own, or had been given 


MY JO, JOHN. 


69 

her by her husband (and her pride rebelled 
vigorously at the taking of these last), or had 
belonged to her children, Mary took, also her 
own portrait painted when she was a girl 
with bright eyes, filled full of happiness for 
her by “ My Jo, John.” 

As the business of packing went on, there 
came swiftly over the house a deserted, un- 
cared-for look, as if its form indeed remained, 
but the spirit of it was departing; and per- 
haps Mary, in her bitterness of heart, was 
not sorry to see how dull the place would be 
with her gracious influence removed, and the 
signs of her everyday occupation lacking. 

Perhaps there was a touch, too, of feminine 
malevolence in the way she ranged the furni- 
ture in stiff and unaccustomed lines against 
the walls, in her stern banishment of growing 
green things and cheerful flowers, in the way 
she divorced the two chairs, always set close 
together in her special “ corner ” of the draw- 
ing-room, so that if John Anderson should 
come straying in after she4iad gone, he should 
be sharply reminded that she had gone for- 
ever. 

The very blinds and windows testified to 


MV JO, JOHN. 


70 

the impending dissolution in the house. 
Usually they were drawn well up, and fresh 
air and sunshine raced in abundantly; but 
now the blinds were half-mast high, the 
windows only gaped in a niggardly fashion, 
and the breezy, sunny atmosphere habitual 
to the whole place was gone. 

Mary felt like a stranger in her own house 
as she moved to and fro, or as if she had died 
and come back unrecognised to haunt the 
place in which she had been so happy, but 
was now forgotten, and perhaps the unreality 
of it all helped to keep her calm, and prevented 
her proud heart from giving way. 

How hard, how inflexible she had grown, 
only Martha Fletcher knew. Martha, who 
was going through a great crisis in her own 
life also, and who was torn between the grief 
she dared not display, and the dignity that 
she felt it due to herself to display under the 
trying circumstances in which she found her- 
self so unexpectedly placed. 

For Fletcher had taken it entirely for 
granted, and as a perfect matter of course, 
that she should accompany her mistress to 
Pigeonwick ; his duty was to his master, and 


JO, JOHN. 


71 

hers to Mrs. Anderson, such duties having 
been entered upon years before there was 
any question of their duty to one another, if 
indeed there were any, as marriage, to Flet- 
cher, was but a trifling episode in his career. 

To break such bonds would only be another, 
and indeed it was on record that after an 
especially rousing exchange of personalities, 
Fletcher had put on his hat with the intention 
of leaving her, and Martha had promptly put 
on her bonnet also with the intention of leav- 
ing him, but they had ended by divesting 
themselves of their head-gear with a solemnity 
befitting the abdication of a crown. 

And now for Martha to have confessed 
fondness for her natural enemy would have 
been to confess herself beaten in the long 
matrimonial duel she and Fletcher had played, 
so Martha resolutely restrained the tears that 
would have intensely relieved her, kept a stiff 
upper lip, and a tongue in admirable working 
order, and worked like one possessed at the 
packing which Mary was so resolute to have 
completed within the stipulated time. 

If Fletcher felt any secret qualms, if he 
occasionally glanced at the prospect of an 


72 


MY JO, JOHN. 


empty place hitherto occupied by a little 
sharp-voiced, comely woman, and thought 
with a man’s dismay of possible buttonless 
shirts and unmended socks, he gave no sign, 
nor did he seem to concern himself at all as 
to whether Polly or Cook would be left be- 
hind, though this matter lay on Martha’s 
mind night and day. Polly’s dimples had 
never been more aggravatingly in evidence 
than during these last days, and as she pro- 
fessed moreover a wholesome hatred of the 
country, where areas are unknown, she was 
heard openly enough to declare she hoped - 
she would be left in town to look after 
“ master.” 

Martha longed to slap those saucy cheeks, 
and give the girl a plain piece of her mind. 
The cook, a middle-aged woman, was one of 
those persons who right through life are 
strictly neuter in all things — a condition of 
mind severely condemned by one of the sages, 
but useful enough for the purposes of every- 
day life. She objected to neither town nor 
country, and so long as she was comfortable, 
ignored the surrounding landscape, so Martha 
was careful to impress on her mistress that 


MY JO, JOHN. 


73 


Sarah was the very person to see after 
“ master’s ” comforts at Harley Street. 

“ Only we want some one to cook for us,” 
said Mary, wearily, who was indeed in no 
trim for the miseries of servant-hunting, and 
not until the very night before they were 
departing, did she rouse herself to say Cook 
was to remain, and Polly was to accompany 
them to Pigeonwick. 

“ You must manage till we get another 
woman,” Mary said, and then Martha went 
off in triumph to inform Polly she was to be 
withdrawn from the admiring eyes of the 
tradesmen’s young men, thereby throwing 
that young woman into a fit of weeping, and 
an ardent longing to be “ even ” with Mrs. 
Fletcher. 

“ She’s jealous of him, that’s what she is ! ” 
wept poor Polly afterwards in confidence to the 
cook. “ Jealous of a bally old image like him ! 
You’d better look out for p’ison or dynamite 
if you’re going to stop here ! ” ] 


But Sarah, who was slow of speech, and 
had a hearty contempt for the whole race of 
man, thought she would be able to take care 
of herself anywhere. 


74 


Mi' JO, JOHN. 


The lawyers brought the deed of separa- 
tion hot-foot, and it had been duly signed 
and carried away again. Hitherto, only their 
own hearts had divided the pair, but now the 
law, or something very like it, had sundered 
them, yet it was John Anderson’s hand, not 
Mary’s, that faltered on writing the necessary 
signature. 

Had she wavered once, would the issue 
have been the same } 

But no tremor, or shadow of regret, shewed 
in Mary’s calm face as she wrote the words 
that set a seal upon the abdication of all a 
woman’s dearest most cherished rights. 


MY JO, JOHN. 


75 


CHAPTER VIII. 

“ He entered in his house, his home no more, 

For without hearts, there is no home ; 

And felt the solitude of passing his own door 
Without a welcome." 

“ You will go with your mistress, Fletcher.” 

“Sir! Sir.r^ 

“ You heard me. You, your wife and Polly 
will accompany Mrs. Anderson to Pigeonwick, 
the cook will remain here to look after me. 
I shall only require breakfast.” 

“ Sir! ” 

Master and man looked at each other, seem- 
ing to have changed places. 

It was the man who was pale, timid, ap- 
pealing. John Anderson, whose resolute 
eyes burned steadily in his pale, composed 
face, while his voice had the authoritative 
ring of command to which, for years, his regi- 
ment had been accustomed, and which his 
men would no more have dared to disobey 
than did Fletcher now. 


76 


MV JO, JOHN, 


“ But, sir,” he pleaded, almost in tears, “who 
will valet you, and look after your clothes 
and comforts ? I’ve waited on you these 
twenty years, and ” 

“ Now your duty is to your mistress — and 
your wife, ” added John Anderson, as an after- 
thought. “ And remember that I place Mrs. 
Anderson in your care, and shall most cer- 
tainly exact an account of your stewardship. 
By serving her faithfully, you serve me better 
than you have ever done before, and believe 
me I shall not be ungrateful. ” 

The man stood with bent head, over- 
whelmed. 

“ And Fletcher — do not return to this house 
on any pretext whatever, unless 1 send for 
you. What you want can be sent after 
you.” 

He turned away, and the man moved like 
one blind towards the door. 

“ Fletcher ! ” 

He came back and lifted his head. 

John Anderson looked at him earnestly, 
then he stretched his hand, the man silently 
wrung it, and then, too really overcome to 
speak, retired from the room. 


MY JO, JOHN. 


77 


Colonel Anderson went out into the hall and 
fetched his hat and stick. 

How desolate, how unutterably dreary 
looked the silent hall, heaped up with pack- 
ages ready for departure, the impedimenta of 
a wife going forth from the home to which 
she had come with such high hopes years 
upon years ago ! 

He glanced up the staircase, that, too, was 
deserted, and no bright face looked down at 
him from above, then with that apathy which 
is the courage of desperation, he opened the 
front door and went out. Fletcher, down- 
stairs, in what was really the darkest hour of 
his life, heard the door shut, and by intuition 
knew that his master had gone, and would 
not return again till they had all departed. 

Mary, tying her- bonnet-strings for the last 
time in her dismantled room, also heard the 
door close, and though she was still firm, still 
mistress of herself, since the hurry ha I been 
so great, and the time for reflection so short, 
felt herself quiver at the sound. 

She knew that he had been in the house, 
just as he always knew also when she was in, 
though they never met, never crossed each 


MV JO, JOHN, 


78 

other’s paths, or made a single enquiry about 
one another, throughout the whole three 
days. 

Martha came in smiling. 

“ Oh, ma’am, ” she said, “ master says Flet- 
cher is to come with us — and he’s getting 
ready now. ” 

“ He wants a free hand, ” thought Mary, 
with curling lip. “ Perhaps he is going to 
bring her here — who knows? These smait 
ladies do such disgraceful things.” 

“ Indeed, ” she said aloud, drawing on her 
gloves. “ Is the carriage here ? ” 

“No, ma’am. There’s half- an-hour before 
starting yet, ” and, perhaps feeling her happi- 
ness to be indecent, Martha turned, and fairly 
ran out of the room. Mary smiled bitterly 
to herself. 

So this jangling, halting, unbeautiful chain 
of married life was to go unbroken to the end, 
while the silken thread with never a knot in 
it, that had bound her and John Anderson to- 
gether, was to snap violently asunder at the 
first tug, to the scorn and derision of the 
world ! 

She crossed the room, and unlocked the 


MV JO, JOHN. 


79 


dressing-room door. Bare and meagre looked 
the narrow bed, she thought, uncared for and 
deserted the whole place, and does not furni- 
ture reflect the dejected mood of its occupier ? 
and yet Polly had swept it, and Fletcher had 
tidied it, and John Anderson had slept in it, 
for how long ? She thought it must be at 
least a year. 

A thin overcoat was lying on the back of a 
chair, seeming to take the lines of his gaunt 
figure as clothes do seem to catch the identity 
of the wearer. Obeying an uncontrollable 
impulse, and it was the first natural one she 
had known for days, she stooped down and 
pressed her lips to it. Through the thin 
cloth she felt the crackle of paper, and though 
she had never been one to ^y into anything, 
she instinctively drew the letter out, and stood 
looking at the handwriting. 

It was Lady Blanche’s and she read the 
contents deliberately. 

“ My poor fellow, ” it ran. “ Come to me 
at once, Can nothing be arranged 'I ” 

Yours ever, 

“ Blanche J. ” 


8o 


MV JO, JOHN, 


She put the letter back, and replaced the 
coat. 

:J: ^ ^ Hs * 

Dusk was falling when John Anderson 
lifted his latch, and came in. 

The hall lamp was not lit. Through the 
open dining-room door he saw the table laid 
for one. 

He passed into his study, and looked at 
his books - those beloved books that Mary 
had been so jealous of, since they robbed her 
of many an hour of his company ! He might 
sit at them now as long as he liked— there 
was no one to rebuke him, no one toJ^re if 
he did, or didn’t. It was only love’s eye that 
had wanted him, and love was gone. 

There was nobody to notice now if he went 
out all askew, nobody to brush him up, to tell 
him he was a disgrace to be seen, and she 
wouldn’t go out walking with him for worlds 
— then tie her bonnet on, and go out with 
him as pleased as Punch ! There was no one 
to be sorry now and look a culprit because 
she had forgotten to sew on a button, for she 
did all those things for him herself, and never 
trusted the maids. Perhaps he would under- 


MY JO, JOHN. 8 1 

stand soon, when no one cared how long he 
read, or how late he sat up, that her grumbling 
had sprung from love — love only — because 
she loved him so that she could never weary 
of his company, however much of it she had. 

Mechanically he looked in the glass, and 
half lifted his hand to twist his moustachios 
as she liked to see them, and then he remem- 
bered, and his hand fell to his side. 

The cook came awkwardly, with unaccus- 
tomed cap and apron, and called him to din- 
ner, to which he went obediently, feeling like 
a stranger sitting at his own table, and with 
a weight of misery on his heart that rose up 
to meet each mouthful and nearly choked 
him. 

What was it that he missed, and that he 
was so lost without 't 

And this is what he missed. 

The little railing voice that could be so 
sweet and say such true and tender things 
. . . the officious little hand (that his own 
swallowed so easily) which never wearied of 
serving him, though often it would vex his 
soul by disarranging his table . . . the blithe 

little presence that never suffered dulness or 
6 


82 


My JO, JOHN. 


mnui to come nigh him, and that so amply 
supplemented and filled out his own quieter 
nature that, until it was withdrawn, he scarcely 
knew whence the sunshine came . . . these 
were some of the things that he missed. 

And then ran in his head those most pa- 
thetic lines out of the Lay of Virginius: 

“ And none will weep when I go forth, 

Or smile when I return, 

Or sit beside the old man’s hearth.” 

Suddenly he sprang up, and went into his 
study. 

There were writing materials among the 
litter, and he seized them and began to write. 

“ Mary (he said), — You have left me, and 
for a reason I deplore, but it is one that I can- 
not alter, and I must bear the miserable con- 
sequences of it alone. God help me, for you 
will not, and I have been too supremely happy 
with you in the past to go on living beside 
you under our altered circumstances. 

“ God bless you, good-bye, 

“Your Jo, John.” 


MY JO, JOHN. 


83 


CHAPTER IX. 

“ But one, I wis, was not at home, 

Another had paid his gold away ; 

Another called him thriftless loon 
And sharply bade him wend his way.’* 

“ What ! ” said Lady Blanche, in the tone of 
an avenging goddess, and rising with the port 
of an insulted empress. 

“ And people say it’s your doing,” went on 
her friend calmly ; “ so ridiculous— as if you 
would take the trouble to detach such a man 
as that from his lawful spouse ! ” 

“ fie is a very distinguished man for all his 
untidy looks,” said Lady Blanche, feeling this 
last remark to be a slur on her taste ; “ but 
what a fool — what a fool to allow his dowdy 
little wife to compromise me ! Me ! ” 

“ Yes — it’s too bad,” said Mrs. Wentworth 
drily, “ and you with a baby at least every two 
years — so respectable! As if any woman who 
had a large family could be anything but 
respectable I ” 


84 


MV JO, JOHN. 


“ Netta ! ” said Lady Blanche furiously. 

Netta shrugged her shoulders. 

A duller a benejica',' she muttered under 
her breath, adding aloud : 

“ What possessed you to play off your tricks 
on himl A man as innocent as a baby — not 
rich — devoted to his wife ” 

“ So it appears,” said Lady Blanche, dis- 
posing of her long limbs on a deep couch 
littered with cushions. “ I’ll tell him to fetch 
the little idiot back.” 

“ It’s too late ! ” said Netta, with a grimace ; 
“ there has been a formal separation — a divis- 
ion of goods and chattels — lawyers called in 
— and he reigns in Harley Street alone, and 
she is sniffing country breezes at Pigeonwick.” 

“ He never told me one word about it,” said 
Lady Blanche, in a tone of virtuous indigna- 
tion. 

“ Do men usually talk to their wives about 
the other men’s wives who are kind to them 't ” 
said Netta, raising enquiring eyebrows. “ I 
fancy not, nor vice versa. Console yourself 
with the thought that you have triumphed 
over yet another of the sex you hate and 
adorn.” 


MV JO, JOHN. 


85 

“ I would never have allowed it,” said Lady 
Blanche, knitting her fine brows, “ I would 
have insisted on his coaxing the stupid, and 
keeping her at home. A fine thing for me to 
be supposed to have separated a husband and 
wife ! ” 

“It isn’t what we da, it’s what the world 
sees us do, that matters,” said Netta placidly, 
“ and you couldn’t expect that man — always 
tied to his wife’s apron-strings — to be as rusee 
or clever as the average London man, or your 
usual cicisbeos are. Is there nothing else in 
the business, Blanche ? ” she added sharply 
and suddenly. 

Lady Blanche frowned, but her eyes, those 
great black eyes that passion might soften, 
but love never, did not quail. 

“ Is it so strange that a man should fall in 
love with me.f^ ” she said, lolling on her cush- 
ions and looking “ dallying and dangerous,” 
as Walpole said of the Woffington’s picture; 
“ I’m sure I didn’t ask him to — and I see that, 
like most fools, he will give more trouble than 
forty knaves rolled into one. People think 
there musl be something wrong when a 


86 


MV JO, JOHN. 


woman s admired by a man whose wife has 
left him ” 

“ Then why, don’t you drop him ? ” said 
Netta with an innocent air. 

“ Because ” Lady Blanche had the 

grace to color a little through her rich skin, 
“there are — are reasons, why I must let him 
down gently, but down he shall come all the 
.same. Meanwhile I shall pack him off to 
that place in the country with the rural name ” 
— (“ Troory-roory,” murmured Netta sleepily) 
— “ and insist on his bringing her back.” 

“ Supposing she won’t come ” said 
Netta. 

“ Oh ! those dowdies are so unused to be- 
ing flattered that she’ll cave in at the first 
word. And really I’ve done with him — and 
he bores me to extinction.” 

“ Mrs. Anderson is a quiet little woman, 
certainly,” said Netta, “ but she doesn’t strike 
me as being quite as characterless as you 
suppose. I’ll bet you a pony she doesn’t come 
back!” 

“ Done I ” said Lady Blanche, producing 
her tablets and noting the bet. 

“ And will you pay if you lose 1 ” asked 


MV JO, JOHN. 87 

Netta incredulously, as she arose and sur> 
veyed herself in a long glass near. 

“ Really — honor bright.” 

Lady Blanche had drawn her long, lazy 
limbs together, and was now standing up, and 
towering half a foot above her friend. 

“ I’ll give you a week,” said Netta briskly, 
“ a week in which you have to wheedle him 
to return to the wife of his bosom, and in 
which he has to wheedle her to return to his. 
But 1 think, Blanche, I that you’ll lose ! ” 

“ O ! no ! ” said Lady Blanche calmly, as 
she lifted her grand arms to put in place a 
plait of her black hair ; “ he does everything 
I tell him — everything — and he believes I am 
an angel — still ! ” 

“ Nous verronsl' said Netta, who had done 
preening herself before the mirror. “ Good- 
bye, dear — is that Fitzwalter’s voice .? H’m 
Zz^^is no fool anyway.” And she paused at 
the door to look back. “ You’ll never impose 
on him as you’ve done on honest John An- 
derson — or fleece him either,” she added to 
herself as she went out. 


88 


JO, JOHN, 


CHAPTER X. 

“What a man should learn is to regret all that is useless in 
remembrance, and to retain with cheerfulness all that can profit 
and amend.” Petrarch. 

“ Mother ! ” 

“ Yes, Tom ? ” 

“ The poor old dad must have gone off his 
chump ! ” 

“ Not a bit of it. He was more reasona- 
ble, and standing more by himself, you know, 
Tom, than he has done for years.” 

Mother and son, who had been walking 
along comfortably, with their arms round each 
other’s shoulders, stood stock-still to look at 
one another, and woman -like she suddenly 
observed how much bigger and broader he 
had grown, and exclaimed, at the change in 
him : 

“ Tom,” she said, wistfully, “ it seems yester- 
day that you were a boy, a little innocent boy, 
depending on me for everything, and now 


MV JO, JOHN. 


89 

you are grown up, and soon you will have 
secrets of you own — like your father — and be 
getting a wife, and of course you will like her 
best. Do you remember,” she added, in that 
tone of eager looking- back which is never 
used by a woman who is happy in the present, 
“ how you asked me once which I loved best, 
grandma or you.f^ I said 'you' and was re- 
buked by your telling me that ‘one should 
always love one’s mother best ! ’ ” 

“ Dear little mother,” said Tom, kissing her 
tenderly, “ and so I always shall — at least till 
I find someone better than you.” 

They had come out for a walk and a talk 
together, choosing the path to the wood, and 
under other circumstances Mary in such com- 
pany would have been enjoying herself down 
to the ground. 

The thrill, the warmth of early Summer 
rose in the air, nightingales hid in the thickets, 
the fugitive cry of the cuckoo was abroad, 
blossoms hung on the boughs, and through 
the short turf thrust the now modest, now 
splendid heads of flowers, that made a finer 
mosaic than the rarest marbles and jewels 
ever put together by cunning human hands. 


90 


JO, JOHN. 


Mary leaned her head for a moment on 
Tom’s broad shoulder. It was so sweet to 
be petted once more, to have someone to love 
and to love her, and she had hitherto refrained 
from any such sympathy, and never told Tom 
a word of the state of affairs till he came up 
for a few days’ holiday. 

“ I never cry, Tom,” she said, looking at 
him with eyes that had something strained in 
them, “ I can’t — it is all too dreadful.” 

Tom hugged her again, then picked a cow- 
slip to add to the flowers in her hand they 
had gathered as they came along, and she 
smiled at it absently and without pleasure, 
for the sense of smell is curiously dependent 
on one’s state of mind. 

“ It beats my comprehension,” said Tom, 
drawing his young brows into a straight line, 
while his ruddy, beardless face tried to lengthen 
itself and failed, “ but how did it all hap- 
pen?” 

They had reached the wood now, and sat 
down on a felled tree close to a silver- barked 
beech, whose twigs were yet swelling with 
brown buds, left behind laggards in the race 


MV JO, JOHN, 


91 

that had been run by elm and oak and haw- 
thorn when they rushed out into green. 

“ You know, Tom,” said Mary, her tired 
eyes roving from the wind flowers to that 
delicate white wonder of the woods whose 
trefoil leaves are folded like a heart, “ your 
father was always quiet and absent-minded, 
but for weeks past he has become so silent 
and self-absorbed that there was no getting a 
word out of him, and then he took to going 
out by himself, and, when I asked him, would 
not tell me where he went, and got quite 
snappish and — and rude, Tom, positively 
rude.” 

“ Worried about something,” said Tom, 
thoughtfully. 

“ And he would not answer me, Tom — al- 
ways answer your wife, dear, when you have 
got one, unless you wish to drive her mad — 
and always, always give her the last 
word.” 

“ I think dad always let you have that, 
mother,” said Tom, smiling broadly. 

“ But I behaved very badly that day — the 
day a separation was agreed upon,” said Mary, 
hanging her head and flushing vividly. “ I 


MV JO, JOHN. 


92 

— I actually asked him to hit me, Tom, that 
I might get a divorce ! ” 

“ Mother ! ” 

“Yes, Tom — may Heaven forgive me! 
Did ever you know such an unwomanly 
woman ? And I said — O I I thought it clever 
then, but I see now how vulgar it was — I told 
him that after all I didn’t want a divorce, as 
I might get married again, and I didn’t want 
to make a second mistake I ” 

Tom put up his hand to hide a grin, he 
thought his mother had been “going it” with 
a vengeance. 

“ Dad knew you didn’t meap it,” he said 
soothingly. “ It isn’t your way of talking at 
all. But has it struck you, mother,” he added 
with sudden gravity, “ that perhaps father has 
been losing money You know if our young- 
est child does get an idea into his head, it is 
generally a wrong one ! ” 

“ No,” said Mary, with her head in the air, 
“ it has not struck me at all. Mr. Golds- 
worthy has managed our affairs for years, and 
he would never allow it. No, it is nothing 
about money.” 

Mary, like most women, would prefer to 


JO, JOHN. 


93 


hear that her husband had lost every sixpence 
that he possessed rather than know that the 
smallest corner of his heart had been filched 
from her by another woman. 

“ Then what have you quarrelled about, 
mother "t ” said Tom, point blank. 

Mary blushed. 

How could she tell this boy that his father 
was treating her so ill ? Naturally he loved 
his mother best, and the words would stick 
in her throat. 

“Your father does not care for me any 
longer,” she said, in a low voice, her eyes 
fixed on the blossoming earth. “ He was 
willing that we should separate, he hurried it 
up as fast as he could, and I don’t believe he 
breathed freely till I was packed out of the 
place, and sent here, like a naughty child in 
disgrace ! ” 

“ But, mother,” said Tom. helplessly, “dad 
simply adores you, he thinks of no one on 
earth but you, and he did not even take me 
into a moment’s consideration. There must 
be some frightful misunderstanding some- 
where.” 

“ No,” said Mary doggedly, “ there is none.” 


94 


My JO, JOHN. 


“ He never even cared to cultivate his 
friends,” went on Tom. “ He seldom spoke 
to a man, and never Looked at a woman.” 

Mary’s cheeks flamed and her eyes flashed, 
thereby letting in light on Tom’s not alto- 
gether unsophisticated mind. 

“ Wh-e-w ! ” he whistled. “ Why, mother,” 
and he began to laugh softly as at an irresis- 
tibly absurd idea, “ fancy the poor old dad 
Jlirting ! Why he doesn’t even know the 
way ! And if he did, he’s much too lazy to 
take the trouble ! ” 

Mary made no reply, and tried not to look 
unutterable things. 

“ I think, Tom,” she said, after a little pause, 
“ that some weak people find courage to do 
things that strong people are positively afraid 
to do, and they will go on doing it too per- 
severingly, though they know it is wrong, 
and they suffer horribly for it right away 
through.” 

Tom’s face had grown very grave, even 
stern, at his mother’s words. 

“If father has been serving you badly, 
mother” he said hotly, then paused abruptly. 
It was an upside-downness of everything that 


MY JO, JOHN, 


95 


the “ youngest child,” the care of the whole 
establishment, should have revolted against 
the love that had always surrounded him, and 
that he should hanker after strange women 
was past Tom’s comprehension. 

“ Mother dear,” he said, “ you have got some 
wrong idea in your head, and that you wrong 
father, I am certain. It is much more likely 
that he has lost money, and is afraid and 
ashamed to tell you, but feels he cannot be 
with you and keep it back.” 

“ No,” said Mary very distinctly, “ it is no 
mistake, and I read her letter, and he wrote 
to me admitting it, and asking me to forgive 
him. But I have not forgiven him, and I will 
not. Only you must not be unkind to him, 
Tom, for it is no sin against you —none at all. 
Pick me that hyacinth over there — how blue 
it is ! Look at the light falling on that glade 
and thicket. I ought to be happy here, ought 
I not.*^ With such walks and drives— such a 
delicious little house, and my own rnistress, 
Tom, just as if I were a widow, indeed ! But 
I’ve found out, Tom,” she added wistfully, 
“ that even this wood and all the loveliness 
around will not satisfy me. Nature leaves 


MV JO, JOHN. 


96 

you out in the cold, somehow, and you must 
admire her in couples to get the human touch 
into your love for her. I suppose that is why 
people all migrate to the big cities, they must 
be with their own kind or they perish.” 

“Mother!” said Tom distressfully, and 
looking anxiously at the slender hand that 
she had slipped into his, and which had 
grown so thin that the rings were slipping off 
it. 

“ And when your vacation comes we will 
have fine times together. It is like a glimpse 
of heaven your being here for these few days,” 
she went on with feverish hurry, ‘'and, oh, 
Tom I it’s so good to have some one to speak 
to besides servants I ” 

“ But there are neighbours,” saidTom, look- 
ing up at the clouds drifting across the vivid 
blue, and thinking, though he was by no 
means poetical, that even so were the first 
clouds drifting across his own sunny life, 
“ don’t they call ? ” 

“ They called, of course,” said Mary, holding 
up her head like a child in disgrace who knows 
it is the “ the other one ” who deserves 
whipping, “ and they enquired for your father, 


MV JO, JOHN. 


97 


and I have seen them whispering together at 
church, and I can see as plain as a pikestaff 
that they think me a deserted woman. People 
always take it for granted it is the woman’s 
fault, chiefly, I suppose, because they don’t 
expect anything of a man, and so are not 
disappointed.” 

“ Mother,” cried Tom, “ you are growing 
bitter — not like you. And as to the people, 
let ’em talk ” he added robustly, “ and the 
world let it howl ! It howls outside, not in. 
If you have comfort and warmth and love in- 
doors ” 

“ But I have not,” almost whispered poor 
Mary. 

“ Sit inside, and laugh ! What’s the world ? ” 
continued the young philospher, contemptu- 
ously. “ Will it feed you, clothe you, warm 
you, bury you } Not much. But it will take 
the last morsel of cake out of your mouth to 
feed itself, and handsomely provide you with 
a character that might be that of your worst 
enemy for all the resemblance it bears to your- 
self ! ” 

“ Really, Tom ! ” said Mary laughing a 
little, as the young fellow paused for breath, 


MV JO, JOHN. 


98 

“ Oxford is certainly expanding your idea’s 
But you are a little hard on the world, after all. 
What is it composed of but suffering, erring 
creatures like ourselves, who may be in worse 
trouble than ourselves, at any moment, or 
who may die even while they are blaming or 
pitying us, and so it is our turn to pity them ? 
It isn’t the outside opinion I feel, Tom, it’s 
the loneliness in the house, by the hearth, and 
here ^' — she pressed her hand upon her breast 
as if to hold down her heart. 

“ Little mother,” said Tom, to whom the 
sunshine had suddenly grown dim, and all 
the loveliness around a mere callous hard-eyed 
selfishness, that understood nothing of human 
misery, “ I shall leave Oxford and come home 
to you.” 

“ And spoil your career ? ” said Mary calm- 
ly, and blaming herself bitterly for having 
loosed the vials of her speech and sorrow. 
“ Never ! I shall do very well here till you 
come back, and your Aunt Mamie is coming 
home next month. She will come straight 
to me, of course.” 

“ Then I shall go to father,” said Tom res- 
olutely, “ and get to the bottom of this miser- 


MY JO, JOHN, 


99 

able affair. I’ll never believe that dad looked 
at any other woman but you, or that so true 
a gentleman as he is, could behave as you 
think he has done.” 

“ Think ? ” said Mary fiercely. “ Look 
here, Tom. There’s an old proverb, ‘ ’Twixt 
bough and trunk place not the finger,’ and 
you must not interfere in this thing — I will 
not have it. If you brought your father down 
to me to-morrow, I would walk out of the 
house rather than the same roof should cover 
us.” 

Mary had risen, and was walking rapidly 
homewards, just as if the delicious winding 
ways of the glades were not set thick with 
loveliest surprises, not one of which would 
last year have failed to ravish her happy 
eyes. 

“ But I shall go all the same,” said young 
Tom to himself, nodding as he followed her, 
“ and if they won’t kiss and be friends, I shall 
just chuck up the ’varsity and come home 
and take care of mother.” 


lOO 


JO, JOHN, 


CHAPTER XI. 

“ Ye sae ye are a courteous knight, 

But I think ye are nane, 

I think ye’re but a miller lad, 

By the color o’ your claething.” 

The windows at Pigeonwick were all open, 
and the sleepy, hot summer air might have 
lulled to slumber any worker, tired in brain 
or limb, who found himself stretched in a 
rocking-chair beneath the wide verandah 
that; extended round three sides of the house. 

But the two women who had been resting 
all day, who were tired of rest, and wanted 
life and movement instead, and who dreaded 
the long hours of the summer night, held no 
sleep between their eyelids, as they languidly 
set some stitches in their needle-work, and 
talked — as sisters do talk who have been sep- 
arated for years. 

There was a big gap, in age, between the 
two, for Mary had been thirteen when Mamie 


MV JO, JOHN, 


lOI 


was born ; but when the latter grew up, the 
difference between them seemed to vanish, 
and it had been a terrible wrench to Mary 
when the girl went out to India, to be mar- 
ried from a friend’s house to a man the elder 
sister had never seen. 

The pair had met at a country house, and 
the man had, shortly after, gone with his 
regiment to India, and from there had writ- 
ten to Mamie, entreating her to come out to 
him and be his wife ; and, much to every- 
body’s amazement, Mamie had picked up the 
handkerchief so graciously dropped to her — 
and gone. 

Mary had packed some tears and thwarted 
hopes in with the girl’s bridal-gown of white 
and silver, and she had trembled as she told 
Mamie how little she knew of this man to 
whom she was going so unhesitatingly, and 
Mamie had laughed, with the pure, utterly 
happy joy of a girl who is living in love’s 
young dream, and without a tremor or a 
doubt, or a regret, she had gone, and the 
groom had met his bride, and the bride was 
a wife of some years’ standing now. 

And now the pair had come home, and 


102 


MV JO, JOHN. 


Captain Dewar had gone first to his own 
people in Scotland, and Mamie had come 
straight to Pigeonwick, and they had talked, 
these sisters, of everything upon earth save 
their own hearts. 

Mamie had been a beauty, which Mary 
never was, and she had had the brightest 
smile and the merriest laugh that ever girl 
had, and she was as merry and bright now 
as she had been then, or at least so said the 
Fletchers, assuring each other, acrimonious- 
ly, that she had drawn a prize in the matri- 
monial lottery, anyway. 

But Mary looked deeper, and she found 
the heart and soul of the smile gone, and the 
merriment might pass muster with the world, 
but it rang untrue in the ears that so jeal- 
ously held the memory of a spontaneous hap- 
piness in every ripple of the girl’s young 
voice. 

And Mamie’s blue eyes were as exquisite 
as ever, only they had a different look in 
them, as if they had gazed out for a long 
while on something that hurt them, and the 
hurt had been gotten over, but the look re- 
mained. 


MY JO, JOHN. 


103 

And Mary said to herself that something 
had caused her to suffer exceedingly, so 
much that she would never be able to suffer 
very much again ; and having made a com- 
promise with life (as most of us do), had 
taken counsel with a brave heart, and resolved 
that, if she wore it on her sleeve, it should 
look as gay as the best. 

Mamie could enjoy a joke as well as ever. 
She was, indeed, much given to raising her 
own and her neighbours’ spirits, wheresoever 
she might find herself, by amusing stories, 
and an exercise of that sense of humour which 
is so rare in a woman, and she got immense 
satisfaction out of the peculiarities of the 
Fletchers, and even occasionally made sad- 
eyed Mary enjoy them too. 

But on this especial afternoon, Mamie was 
barren of jokes, and Mary felt the oppression 
of life weighing her down heavily, like clods 
on a half-dead man’s breast. 

The peace and loveliness of the garden 
positively sickened her, and the buzzing of 
the droning flies irritated her nerves; she 
actually thought, with keen longing, of the 


104 


MY JO, JOHN. 


hot and dusty Park, where folks congregated, 
and a hum of talk filled the air. 

“ It’s very good of you, Mamie, to bury 
yourself down here,” she burst out suddenly, 
“just to be with me — when so much is going 
on in Town. And of course, you expected 
to find me at Harley Street, when you came 
home.” 

“ Yes,” said Mamie, “ I did. But it was 
you I came to see, not your house.” 

She dropped her work, got out of her long 
chair as only a graceful young woman could, 
and knelt down beside her sister. 

“ Mary,” she said, “ dear old girl,” — and 
laid her cheek to the older and paler one — 
“ can’t you talk about it, even to me } It 
would do you good — and if you could cry, it 
would be better still.” 

Her arm was round Mary’s neck now, and, 
for awhile, they held each other tightly, and 
neither spoke. 

“ It’s no good, Mamie,” she said at last, 
“ nothing can alter it . . . and I suppose 
men are so .. . but I am glad Dolly died. 
It would drive me mad to think she might 
ever live to go through what I have done.” 


JO, JOHN, 


105 


“ Amen,” said Mamie. 

Mary put her sister a little away, and 
looked in her face. 

“ Do you say that 't ” she said, “ and you 
are not five-and-twenty yet ! Oh ! it is hor- 
rible ! And you loved him so, child — how 
you loved him ! ” 

“Yes,” said Mamie, slowly, “ I did love 
him, with the pure, true love of a girl. It’s 
dead now, Mary — he killed it, utterly, and it 
will never come back, never, never.” 

“ What did he do ? ” said Mary, almost in 
a whisper. “ Was it — was it like John } ” 

Mamie shook her head. 

“ They were little things,” she said, “ but 
little things break a woman’s heart, just as 
little worries, household worries, age a wo- 
man before her time, and make her old, 
while the man beside her keeps young. And 
if men only knew how, by trifles, they write 
their characters across our lives, and how 
our respect or contempt for them is formed 
by the merest nothings, they would be more 
careful how they behave . . . but they never 
know. And you and I get on far better 
now than when we were first married — capi- 


Io6 MY JO, JOHN, 

tally, in fact — and people hold us up to ad- 
miration as a pattern pair.” 

“ And he doesn’t know ? said Mary, al- 
most piteously. 

“ No — and, please God, never shall. If he 
holds the casket, what matter if the jewel be 
gone ? He will never look — and he will 
never know.” 

“But you are so pretty, child, and so 
young,” said Mary, sadly, “ there will be 
somebody else.” 

“ Yes. He has come and gone,” said the 
girl, quietly, “ long after I had — been disillu- 
sioned. After all, you have only to stand 
firm, to hold on by your eyelids, and 
strength will come, somehow, to enable you 
to hold on after. And if one is only starved 
long enough, one can do very well without 
love, and one does not cry out and hunger 
after it as daily bread.” 

Mary pressed the bright head down on 
her breast with a sudden sob of pain. 

“ It is too cruel,” she said, “ that you 
should be made to suffer so — that we must 
all suffer so.” 

“ Not all,” said Mamie, “ it is only the 


MV JO, JOHN. 


107 

women who are capable of loving very pas- 
sionately and purely, who suffer when they 
marry men who never attempt to understand 
them, supposing that when a woman’s love is 
gained once, it is gained forever. There’s 
something pathetic about it, too,” she went 
on, after a pause, “ that men should be at 
once so brutal and so trusting. But I’ve 
come to the conclusion, Mary, that no woman 
ever understands a man properly, and no man 
a woman, or if he does. Providence intended 
him for a woman — and spoiled him in the 
making.” 

“ Mamie,” said her sister, pulling the girl 
back and looking at her with horror-stricken 
eyes. “ It’s all so strange, so new to me to 
hear any one talk so — most of all you. It 
seems yesterday you were a child, and you 
know so much more than I do, and you think 
so badly of men, and yet you tolerate them 
. . . and I could not tolerate John.” 

“ I can’t understand it — about John,” said 
Mamie, shaking her head, “ he was so devoted 
to you, and he never seemed to know there 
was another woman in the world. What 


JO, joHM, 


io8 

possible attraction could she have had for 
him, or he for her? ” 

“ He is a man,” said Mary, bitterly, “ and 
all is fish that comes to Lady Blanche’s net. 
But O ! my dear, you say Captain Dewar 
disillusioned you, and John never did me, it 
was I who disillusioned him — I wore him 
out bit by bit with my horrid temper — or he 
never would have behaved as he did.”* 

“ Stuff,” said Mamie, “ you were never bad 
tempered — he began it, I know. How did it 
begin ? ” 

“ He used to hide things from me,” said 
Mary, hanging her head, “ letters and things, 
and he never told me where he was going, or- 
else he made up something palpably untrue, 
and one day I found him at Lady Blanche’s, 
and then I knew.” 

“She wanted something of him,” said 
Mamie, “ and she flattered him,” she added 
with curling lip, “ and flattery will undo the 
the best man living. Fool him to the top of 

I his bent, and he thinks you are an angel : 
tell him some home-truths, make fun of some 
personal peculiarity, and you are a devil. A 


MV JO, JOHN, 


109 

woman who has studied flattery as a fine art 
rules the world.” 

“ I never flattered John,” said Mary, with 
gentle dignity ; “ even if I had tried, I should 
not have known how. Do you flatter Cap- 
tain Dewar } ” 

“ I manage him,” said Mamie, with a trace 
of hardness in her voice. “ When one cannot 
have the real thing, it is necessary to put up 
with an imitation of it, unless you want to be 
jeered at by the world. He will call me by 
more superlatives in one day, Mary, than 
John ever called you in a month, yet John 
loved you, Mary — loves you still. I’ll swear — 
and Jem never did more than fancy me.” 

“ What is it to fancy? ” said Mary, absently, 
her heart secretly throbbing with joy at 
Mamie’s words. 

“ A fancy, Mary, is a thing for which there 
is one cure that has never been known to 
fail,” said Mamie, springing up, “ and that is 
— marriage.” 


no 


MV JO, JOHN, 


CHAPTER XII. 

The long, unlovely platform of Euston was 
alive with passengers taking their seats in the 
night mail for the North, taking them too, 
wifh a glad, eager hurry that told with what 
rejoicing men and woman were fleeing away 
on this broiling loth of August to the purity 
and coolness of the moors. 

Towards the middle of the train, a Pullman’s 
•car, labelled “ Engaged,” was the centre of 
much fuss and commotion, from the number 
of servants going in and out, while in their 
midst half-a-dozen men and women were 
making an amount of noise that only really 
smart people dare to indulge in in public. 

The party was Lady Blanche Jessup’s, or 
rather a considerable number of the party 
were going on to Perthshire with her, and 
among these persons was Mary’s husband 
Colonel Anderson, 


MV JO, JOHN, 


III 


She was laughing unstintedly at some 
remark made by one of her companions when 
her glance fell upon John, when she imme- 
diately averted it, and said something in a 
low tone to a man near her, at which he ex- 
ploded into violent mirth. 

Probably the object of it neither saw nor 
heard either, as he made his way to the book- 
stall, meaning to hunt for something solid to 
read on his long journey North. 

There were five minutes yet before the 
train started, and he absently handled and 
looked at some of the literature that was laid 
out in rows, never noticing a lady, who also 
was examining the spread-out wares without 
much display of interest or as if she meant to 
buy. 

She was rather slight in figure and very 
pretty, her hair curled charmingly over her 
forehead, and she was dressed to perfection 
in black, with a great cluster of crimson roses 
in the bosom of her frock. 

She was evidently waiting for some one, 
and turned round every half-minute to look 
about, and so pre-occupied was she that the 
absent-minded man beside her actually saw 


II2 


MV JO, JOHN. 


her first, drawing back as he did so with a 
low cry, that she did not hear. 

Almost at the same moment, a tall, good- 
looking man, evidently in the service, and 
just what Mary had admired when she married 
her untidy husband, joined her, exclaiming : 

“ Why, dear, I was afraid I should miss 
you ! How long have you been here 't ” 

“O! only a few minutes, Jem. What 
time does our train start 1 ” 

In twenty minutes — after this long-bar- 
relled train has been got safely off. Dear me, 
Mary, how sweetly pretty you do look to- 
night!" 

Mary laughed. 

“You see what I have done I " said Mary, 
laughing as merrily as a child. “ You know 
you were always at me about it, and really I 
was tired of being a dowdy, and wanted a 
change I " 

What was that curious sound beside her ? 

Mary turned suddenly, and saw her hus- 
band, John Anderson. 

For a moment she stood petrified, looking 
at the worn, haggard face, and John had al- 
ways carried fine flags of health in his cheeks, 


MV JO, JOHN. 


II3 

thus encouraging her to cruelty. It is your 
man with a skin like a nicely boiled parsnip 
who makes you think twice before putting 
upon him more than providence evidently in- 
tended him to bear. 

“ John, ” said the poor woman, “ your collar 
is unfastened, and no one has brushed your 
coat to-day. Why don’t they take better care 
of you at home } ” 

But John’s eyes were fixed on the fringe 
that partly hid Mary’s white forehead, and the 
consciousness of that thoroughly presentable 
man in the background goaded him to 
fury. 

“ Quite good enough for a man of my age, 
ma’am, ” he said grimly. “ At our time of 
life there’s no need to try and bedizen our- 
selves.” 

And with all the insane jealousy of a man 
who has never been jealous before, he glared 
at the unknown, as if he longed to spring at 
his throat. ! 

But Mary looked at him pitifully, seeing 
new lines and hollows where none had been 
a few short months ago, and then someone 

suddenly shouted out his name, and, lifting 
8 


1 14 MY JO, JOHN. 

his hat, he moved without another word 
towards the train. 

A woman’s high shrill voice rose above all 
the din, and was easily identified by Mary. 

“That is Lady Blanche Jessup’s voice,” 
she said suddenly. “ She is going North, and 
my husband is going with her.” 

She turned her back on the train, and moved 
quickly away, followed by “ Jem, ” just as Tom 
rushing up from an opposite direction, can- 
noned violently against a tall man who turn- 
ing angrily, saw that it was his own son. 

Dad!" cried Tom, out of breath and 
astonished for the moment, then his face 
changed, and his hand fell to his side. 

“ Tom ! ” said John Anderson. 

“ I’ve been to see you, father, ” said the 
young man, “ but you were never to be found 
at home, and I was never allowed farther than 
the doorstep, as if I were a thief. And I’ve 
written to you, and you’ve never answered 


“ I never got your letters, Tom, ” said his 
father. “ If you directed them to Harley 
Street, I never go there now. ” 

Tom’s eyes flashed. 


MV JO, JOHN. 


II5 

“ I can’t talk to you here, sir, ” he said, 
“ can’t we get into some quiet place ? ” 

“ I am going by that train,- ’• said John, 
pointing to the train, which wanted now only 
one minute of departure, “ with — with Lady 
Blanche’s party. Tom,” he added, with a 
hurried catch in his breath, “ look after your 
mother, she has some man capering about 
with her. He calls her dear, and she calls 
him Jem. Yes, Jem! I’ve never seen the 
fellow before in my life, and she’s so pretty, 
you know, Tom — and would you believe it.f^ 
she wears a fringe — a fringe^' repeated poor 
John, his voice rising almost to a scream. 
“ It’s positively disgraceful, but I understand 
now why she talked about getting a divorce.” 

For a moment Tom’s heart failed him ; so 
disordered, so old, so shabby did his father 
look, that a sickening doubt of his sanity 
crossed the poor fellow’s brain. 

“ I say, are you coming, or are you not? ” 
cried out someone, who seized John by the 
arm, and pushed him into the train just as it 
began to move. 

Mechanically, Tom stepped along beside 
it, and was rewarded by seeing his father’s 


MV JO, JOHN. 


head thrust out of the window, and hearing 
his anxious voice say : 

“ Tom, keep an eye on that fellow ! What- 
ever you do, don’t leave your mother alone. 

That fringe ” but the train bore away the 

remainder of the speech. 


my JO, JOHN. 


II7 


CHAPTER XIII. 


“Do not wear on your countenance offensive looks, which, 
though harmless, are unpleasant.” 

Thucydides. 

Fletcher was cleaning silver like a demon 
in a pantry whose open latticed window 
looked out on a garden from which all the 
flowers had vanished, while leaves, leaves, 
leaves ! decorated it gorgeously and held full 
sway. 

The air was at once as mild and fresh as a 
late spring morning. There was the same dewy 
grass, the same blue sky, occasionally veiled 
with snowy clouds, but the promise of the 
earth was over, and its fulfilment was now 
sinking gradually into the warm mother-breast 
whence it had orginally sprung. 

The pale yellow elm-leaves had begun to 
rustle one by one, like silk, to the ground, 
through the dry leaves of the oak a little wind 
went creeping with a moan and a rustle, scat- 


Ii8 MY JO, JO 

tering them in a trembling shower, so loth 
were they to go, so unwilling to make room 
for the vigorous new generation already stir- 
ring within the heart of the giant whence 
they sprang ! 

“ Of all the God-forsaken places on earth,” 
said Fletcher, in a voice of the intensest ex- 
acerbation, “ give me a cottage in the country, 
five miles from a market town, in November. 
What does that garden say,” (he pointed a 
silver fork disgustfully at its lovely melan- 
choly), “ but ‘ Fletcher, go and hang your- 
self,’ ? Why, I can’t even sleep at night for 
the screeching of them nightingales, as goes 
on yellin’ when the other birds has the decency 
to stop, and the sound of the milkman coming 
down the street with his Mok ! Mok ! ’ud be 
downright music to my ears, let alone the 
cats’-meat-man, who’d make me feel myself 
again. And if it weren’t for that poor inno- 
cent up in Town, wandering about all alone 
by himself, and getting into goodness knows 
what scrapes, now as them whose duty it is 
to look after him has deserted him, I’d have 
done it long ago, Martha — hanged if I 
wouldn’t ! ” 


JO, joHjsr. 


119 

“ Hanged if you did, you mean,” said 
Martha, nursing her arms as usual, and wear- 
ing a pink cotton frock also as usual. “ And 
pray what good would that do anybody } ” 

“ You could marry again,” snarled Fletcher, 
who, what with disgust at his surroundings 
and anxiety for his master, was like a bear 
with a sore head. 

“ Not I,” said Martha, comfortably, “ once 
bit, twice shy. Independence for me, if I’m 
left a widow. If I were a man,” continued 
Martha, meditatively, “ you wouldn’t catch me 
marrying — not much ! ” 

“ No more ’ud I, if I had my time over 
again,” said Fletcher. “ Lord ! to think how 
one act of folly can undo a lifetime ! ” 

“ It oughtn’t to,” said Mary, equably. 
“ What a pity one can’t divorce a man for — 

,^iat’s the word — incom — incomp 

^^l^ncomfortability of temper, I suppose 
you mean,” said Fletcher, loftily, “ but they 
do in America, and I’ve heard as how a lady 
once danced in a set of Lancers where every 
Jack man of ’em was a divorced husband, ex- 
cept the eighth, and she was thinking about 
divorcing himr 


120 


MV JO, JOHN. 


“Some people have such luck! ” said Mary, 
thoughtfully; “now she must have been a 
judge of husbands, and likely to know when 
she got a good one. How can a poor wo- 
man be a judge, that’s never had but one? 
And I’m sure if anybody ought to be able to 
get a divorce, it’s missus.” 

Fletcher snorted but made no reply. 

“What has she done, I should like to 
know, to be sent down here, for all the 
world like as if she was put in the corner for 
disgrace, and left alone week after week, 
month after month, till everybody stares at 
her, and thinks she must be as bad as can 
be 1 If she was bad, she’d have got a hus- 
band to dance after her, morning, noon, and 
night I A man likes to see his wife admired 
— he don’t want what nobody else wants I 
Seems to me as he always likes best the w ^ 
man who gives him a lot of trouble — sheriffs 
his hands, and prevents him from getting in- 
to mischief himself — but missus was always 
rniles too good to do that, so what does mas- 
ter do, but go gallivanting himself.” 

“ It’s false I ” cried Fletcher at the top of 
his voice, “ as false a word as a woman ever 


MV JO, JOHN. 


I2I 


spoke! Master was druv out of his own 
house by aggerawation, and ain’t he to speak 
to another human bein’ for the rest of his 
life?” 

“ Human beings, by all means,” said Mary 
in her cool voice, “ but not females — not 
Lady Blanches. A locust, / call her, for it’s 
my belief she’s been eating up master’s sub- 
stance till he’s as bare as a gleaned field.” 

Fletcher paused in his work to turn a pen- 
etrative eye on his better- half. 

“ 1 don’t think you’re so far out, Martha,” 
he said in a tone of wondrous mildness, 
“that’s her character — to get the last shilling 
she can out of a man, and then chuck him. 
And it’s my belief she’s chucked master.” 

“ What have you heard ? ” said Martha 
quickly. 

But Fletcher was already repenting him of 
his burst of confidence, and had withdrawn 
into the silence in which he was able to 
sit as in a tower, out of reach of Martha’s 
tongue. 

“ Missus has fretted worse than ever since 
that night in August when she saw him,” 
went on Martha, showing no sign of rebuff, 


122 


JO, JOHN. 


“ his collar all open,” — Fletcher writhed as if 
undergoing the most exquisite torture — “ his 
trousers looking as if he had slept in ’em,” — 
Fletcher’s long body doubled itself up in 
agony — “ his hat not brushed ” — (Fletcher 
groaned — for what does it matter about the 
inside of your head, that nobody sees, so 
long as the outside covering shines in the 
eyes of all beholders ?) — “ and his poor 
moustachios, one up and one down, like a man 
who’s just got out of the clutches of a 
virago ! ” 

“ Just getting into the clutches of one, you 
mean,” said Martha, “ I wonder if he’s there 
now ? ” 

“ He might have took me,” said Fletcher 
in an aggrieved voice, “ I’m partial to Scot- 
land, it’s a beautiful place. Some parts of it 
is more mowntainious than others.” 

Martha laughed after her aggravating fash- 
ion. She was far better educated than Flet- 
cher, and he often wondered what she found 
to laugh at, now. It always made him 
angry, because he felt sure that somehow — he 
didn’t quite know how — she had got the pull 
over him, but wouldn’t explain. 


MV JO, JOHN, 


123 

“ And if master is there now,” he went on 
loftily, “ it serves missus right. What call 
had she got to leave him ? Didn’t she and 
me together take care of him all his life, and 
how can she expect him to walk alone 
’Course he’s tumbled into a ditch ! But he’s 
that obstinate he’ll never send for neither of 
us to dig him out, for he’s as proud as proud. 
Your folks as never pretend to any pride al- 
ways is, and them as thinks he’s weak and 
easy to lead is very much mistaken. He 
ain’t one to cry out when he’s hurt, he’d just 
bleed quietly inside, and nobody ’ud be the 
wiser. And what you women calls obsti- 
nacy,” went on Fletcher, feeling that he had 
got an idea, and wishing greatly to rise to 
the dignity of it, “ we calls strength — and 
strength it is. We lets you dance about a 
bit, and show off your tempers and airs, and 
think yourselves the boss, but all the time 
we can crush you with a touch, so,” and he 
majestically brought his hand down on the 
handle of a silver cake-basket, that obe- 
diently sank at his spiriting. “ And we are 
patient — patient as we are strong, because if 
we did arise in our might, where” — Fletcher 


124 


MV JO, JOHN. 


paused in the very height of his peroration 
— “ where, I ask, are you ? ” 

Martha began to laugh, went on laughing, 
and finally ran out of the room with whole 
fountains of laughter bubbling up in her 
still. She must tell her mistress this, and it 
would make -her laugh too, but the sudden 
appearance of Tom, hatted and coated, in 
the hall, looking pale and worried, sobered 
her completely. 

“ Where is Fletcher ? ” he said. 

“ In the pantry, Mr. Tom.” 

And Tom, saying “ Don’t tell my mother 
I am here ! ” strode off at express speed. 

Fletcher had his back turned to the door, 
and his squashed attitude betrayed to Tom’s 
experienced eye that a matrimonial duel had 
just taken place, and Fletcher, thinking the 
enemy had returned, did not look round. 

“ Here, I say,” said Tom, “ there’s some- 
thing wrong with the poor governor, and 
we’ve got to find out what it is.” 

Fletcher turned round, very pale, but 
braced up to hear the worst and do his level 
best. 

“ Did you know the house in Harley 


JO, JOHN. 


125 

Street was let — has been let for months ? ” 
said Tom sharply. 

“ No, Mister Tom. Master forbid me to 
go nigh the place, and Cook never wrote 
once — never answered my wife nor me 
either, when we wrote to her, and we 
thought she was forbidden. But is that all 
— only the house let.f*” he added anxiously, 
“it was a big house for master to live in all 
alone.” 

“ It's not all," said Tom, lowering his 
voice. “You know I called more than once 
and never got any farther than the doorstep, 
but to-day I was determined to go in, and I 
pushed past the servant, a stranger, and 
walked straight into the dining-room. There 
was not a stick' nor stone of our things in it ! 
‘ I expected to find my father here,’ I said — 
‘ Colonel Anderson — has he been gone long ? ’ 

“ The girl said the family came in in Sep- 
tember, but the house had been empty and 
unfurnished for months before that, as her 
mistress had looked over it as early as June. 
June ! what has become of everything — an4 
what has become of your master since 
June.'^’ 


126 


MY JO, JOHN. 


“ Missus saw him in August, so did you,” 
said Fletcher trembling. “ How has he 
been living all this time, poor, poor soul, 
with nobody to vally him, or do nothing.'^” 

“ I have been to his club,” said Tom, knit- 
ting-his brows ; “ he has not been there since 
May. I have seen Mr. Goldsworthy, but he 
was very reticent : said my father might have 
lost money, but not through him ; and that I 
had his warm congratulations on my mother’s 
money being tied up on herself and me, and 
therefore safe. And now,” added Tom, “ how 
are we to find him } He seems to have dis- 
appeared and left no trace, or he is wilfully 
hiding from us.” 

“ Ask Lady Blanche,” suggested Fletcher, 
who had a large smudge of plate powder across 
his nose, to save his countenance from un- 
adulterated tragedy. 

Tom blushed, 

“ I suppose I must,” he said savagely, “ but 
she is not likely to trouble herself much about 
him now he is ruined. For he is ruined, 
Fletcher. I feel sure of it, and I believe it 
was because of that, and because he hadn’t 
the courage to tell her, that he consented to 


MV JO, JOHN. 


127 


he — ” Tom paused for a word — “ division of 
households, and that he meant to starve up 
in Town, while we were comfortably provided 
for down here.” 

“ Very likely,” said Fletcher, with tears in 
his eyes, “ his was always the sweetest, most 
unselfish nature in the world, and he’d pre- 
fer to be blamed for things he hadn’t done, 
rather than say anything unkind to anybody, 
or stand up for himself. And now, master 
Tom what are you going to do ? ” 

“ I’m going,” said Tom, his flexible young 
lips straightening into a hard line, “ back to 

Town to find Lady Blanche ” 

“ She’s sure to be in Scotland at this time 
of year,” interpolated Fletcher. 

“ if she is not in Town, I shall go over 

to Scotland,” said Tom, “and if she can’t or 
won’t tell me anything, I shall go to Scotland 
Yard.” 

“ Take me with you, Master Tom,” said 
Fletcher imploringly. 

“ No, I may want you later. Mind, not a 
word to my mother about my being here. I 
thought I heard that beast Dewar’s voice in 
the drawing-room ? ” 


128 


My JO, JOHN. 


“Yes, Master Tom, you did.” 

“ Ugh! Well, I’m off. I’ll let you know 
how things turn out.” 

“ You’ll write or wire me the moment you 
know anything said Fletcher, as implor- 
ingly as a distracted mother asking news of 
her child. 

“ ni write. Keep up your pecker, Fletcher. 
If it’s nothing worse than losing money we’ll 
have him safe at home yet.” 

And ramming his hat on his head, Tom 
vanished by the back door. 

:i; Hi ❖ ❖ ❖ ^ 

“ Martha,” said Mary that evening as her 
woman brushed her hair, “ you have been 
crying. What is the matter ? ” she asked, 
with some surprise, as she knew that never 
had that doughty and independent person, 
been known to shed tears either before or 
after a matrimonial row. 

But Martha went on crying, contorting her 
face hideously, and would neither explain nor 
be comforted. 

“ Is it anything to do with your master.? ” 
said Mary indifferently. 

Yes, she could speak and feel quite indif- 


JO, JOHN. 


129 

ferently now, for the fires of suffering had 
burned themselves out, and in their grey ashes 
lay buried the love that John Anderson had 
so openly betrayed and shamed. 

“ Oh no, ma’am, But he’s been more 
cross and snappish than usual for days, hardly 
touching his food, and railing at the country 
and the litter of leaves as if they were poison. 
He said yesterday he’d give half he was pos- 
sessed of to hear a muffin bell again, or the 
milkman calling ‘ JVJok / ]\Jok ! ’ down the 
area at Harley Street. But — but I never 
thought he’d run away like a housemaid that’s 
forged her own character ; but, O ! ma’am he’s 
done it.” 

“ Run away 'I ” said Mary, standing up in 
her astonishment. 

“ Yes,” cried Martha, wringing her hands, 
“ run away from me, ma’am. To think that 
after all these years I should be disgraced by 
having a man run away from me.” 

Mary’s lips curved between scorn and pity 
as she said : 

“ What makes you think he has run away } ” 

“ He went out directly he’d cleared away 
dinner, and at supper Cook gave me this,” 
9 


130 


My JO, JOHN. 


said Martha, producing a scrap of paper with 
one hand, and drying her eyes with the other. 

Mary read it gravely. Perhaps she was 
thinking of another letter that had been ad- 
dressed to herself. 

Martha,” it said, “ I’m going away. Don’t 
you trubble to follow, becorse you woant find 
me. Make my respecs to missus, and I hope 
as how she’ll forgive me, but I’m following 
the parth of dooty. 

“ Timothy Fletcher.” 

“ And please, ma’am, could you man- 
age with Polly and the cook for a few days, 
while I go and look for him ? ” 


MY JO, JOHN, 




CHAPTER XIV. 


“When all the world should frown on me 
I then should find a trusty friend.” 

Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher were people of great 
distinction in their line, and the few friends 
that they had made in Town (both being 
country folks) occupied a high position in the 
households they had condescended to enter. 

These ladies and gentlemen were in the 
habit of exchanging visits and hospitalities 
with much state and formality at occasional 
intervals, observing a nicety in their conver- 
sation, and a delicacy in their choice of words 
that more than compensated for the vagaries 
of the letter H, as it attached itself to words 
that would have been considerably better 
without it. 

Always careful to keep up appearances, 
Martha never paid visits without Fletcher, 
and once arrived in Town she was at her 
wits’ end how to make enquiries as to his 


132 


MV JO, JOHN, 


whereabouts without revealing the fact that 
she was a forsaken spouse, engaged in the ig- 
nominious task of trying to catch a runaway 
and bring him home. 

For that he had run away from her and the 
dulness at Pigeonwick, and his own heart- 
ache about his master, at last, Martha had no 
manner of doubt, and a strange doggedness 
that had lately shewed in him flashed upon 
her now as a quiet, steady determination to 
go to the devil in his own way, and in his 
own way, time, unhindered by her influence 
or any attempts of hers to stop him. 

His master had been his idol, his one care 
on earth, and he had missed him and fretted 
after him like a mother after her babe, 
and with his object in life gone, he had be- 
come first hard, then desperate, and now he 
did not value his own life and character at 
two pins. 

Then indeed Martha’s heart awoke, and 
howled for her Fletcher, and something bet- 
ter still awoke also, the determination to save 
him from himself, whether he would or no, a 
determination that animating the breasts of all 


MV JO, JOHN. 


m 


husbands and wives would save three parts of 
the piteous tragedies on earth. 

So, when she had established herself in a 
modest lodging, Martha cast about in her 
mind how to begin. 

Fletcher was not a man of low haunts, and 
she knew of none in which to look for him, 
and though it was scarcely likely that, wish- 
ing to elude her, he would look up their 
joint friends, it was possible that he might 
have been seen about in Town by one of 
them, so with the utmost care Martha dressed 
herself out for the round of visits she intended 
to make. 

A good many families were still out of 
Town, but November had also brought a 
great many home — home to the darkness, 
and the fogs and the universal balefulness of 
life under impossible conditions of health, all 
cheerfully endured for the gratification of that 
gregarious instinct which crowds mortals 
together in breathless masses, and makes us 
shun the moor and the country-side they 
must tread alone. 

But the immediate enquiry for “ Mr. 
Fletcher” on Martha’s appearance, immedi- 


134 


MV JO, /OHM. 


ately convinced her that he was not “ in evi- 
dence” anywhere, but that, as she expected, 
he “ lay low,” and it would be a clever Br’er 
Rabbit indeed who unearthed him. 

Martha’s excuse for his non-appearance 
was simple enough. He was in the country, 
a fact that excited no comment in the minds 
of these lords and ladies of plush and satin, 
who would have liked the Fletchers better 
had they not been so sparing in their allu- 
sions to “ our people.” 

To turn master and mistress inside out, 
their habits, income, appearance, faults of 
manner and character, to ruthlessly hold all 
these up to the light, as a careful housewife 
examines the warp and woof of the stuff she 
is buying, is a labour of love to our superiors 
in the kitchen, and the favourite means of oc- 
cupying the elegant leisure with which they 
are so amply blessed. 

But the Fletchers had always said little, and 
that the very best of the Andersons, though 
possibly they enjoyed the racy stories at the 
expense of the first-class misdemeanants up- 
stairs as well as anybody, and occasionally felt 
that while praise is the extinguisher of wit. 


MV JO* JOHN. 


135 


and the most monotonous psalm in the world, 
abuse wears a thousand agreeable charms of 
variety, and is the discoverer of more brill- 
iancy in us than we ever supposed ourselves 
to possess. 

So when Martha had quietly exhausted her 
visiting-list without results, she had only her- 
self to fall back upon, and very dull she 
found it, with her occupation gone — the oc- 
cupation of sharpening her wits and tongue at 
Fletcher’s expense, her duties to Mrs. Ander- 
son being a matter of quite secondary con- 
sideration. She missed those duties now, 
and had that miserable feeling of idleness 
that in one accustomed to work is the most 
demoralizing and hopeless of sensations, and 
something very like despair began to settle on 
Martha’s soul as the days went by, and still 
she had not obtained the smallest clue to her 
husband’s whereabouts. 

She did not write to her mistress, she pre- 
ferred rather to be thought neglectful and un- 
grateful than that she should have to confess 
how completely Fletcher had given her the 
slip. 

That he was not with his master at Harley 


MV JO, JOHN. 


136 

Street, she had very quickly found out, for 
the whole look of the house, the people and 
children who went in and out, shewed plainly 
enough that he had let the place, let it fur- 
nished, as she supposed, as it all looked much 
as usual. 

But one day as she sat in her little room, 
idle, with her stout heart beginning to waver 
in her breast, the thought struck her that 
Fletcher might not be in London at all, but 
in Scotland with his master, or gone abroad 
with some new master, instead of starting at 
full gallop for perdition. 

And then she remembered how he had 
looked latterly, and of one or two things he 
had let drop, and she knew the heart of the 
man was too heavy and broken within him to 
accept service under a new master, and she 
never forgot that, steady as he was, he came 
from a family of ne’er-do-weels, who drank 
hard, lived hard, and usually died in most 
disgraceful fashion. 

She had known all this, yet she had never 
spared him the lash of her tongue all the 
same ; perhaps if she had been better to him 
he would not have fretted after his gentle 


MY JO, JOHN. 


137 


master so much, or at any rate would have 
turned to her for comfort ; and sorrowfully 
as her mistress had confessed her faults of 
temper to her own heart, this stubborn woman 
began to confess hers, and in long hours of 
doubt and wretchedness formed the doughty 
resolve that if ever they came together again 
she would be a perfect Griselda — not that she 
had ever heard of Griselda — and being quite 
unaware that Grizels are born, not made, for 
nature has decreed that a woman can never 
be anything but herself. 

Martha could scarcely eat, barely sleep, and 
keep still not at all, so in her decent black, 
with a thick veil tied over her comely face, she 
tramped the streets, north, south, east and 
west, and late one night as she came down 
the Commercial Road, Heaven, or good luck, 
or Kismet, came to her aid, and tumbling out 
of a public-house Fletcher almost fell into her 
arms. 

With a sob, she caught him, and held him 
fast. 

“ Tim ! ” she said, “ Tim ! I’ve found you ! 
I’ve found you ! ” and kissed him like one 
gone mad for joy. 


JO, JOHN. 


138 

He was in rags, his face dirty, his stubbly 
beard and hair unkempt, but he was the most 
delightful sight to her eyes at that moment 
that the whole beautiful earth could have 
afforded. 

“ Martha ! ” he said, in amazement. 

“ YouVe taken to drink,” she said, in his 
ears, “ I feared it — it’s in the blood — and 
you so troubled about master, and worried by 
my horrid temper and all— it’s done for you, 
my poor Tim — but only just for the time 
being, and you’ll pull round again. If you’ve 
spent all your money, J've got some — and 
now you’ll come along home with me, 
Tim,” and she drew the ragged, soiled arm 
through her own, and led him tenderly away. 

But Tim was not drunk, though he let her 
think so, confirming the idea as he actually 
stooped down and kissed her of his own 
accord. 


MV JO, JOHN, 


139 


CHAPTER XV. 

“ God looks to pure hands, not full ones,” 

Syracuse. 

Captain Dewar had gone to Monte Carlo, 
Mamie had departed to friends in Devon, the 
Fletchers had vanished into space, and Mary 
said to herself that it was a general stampede, 
as she walked through the drifting leaves, in 
the calm November air, noting the griping 
touch of the Frost King’s fingers on autumn’s 
lingering treasures. 

Mamie had begged Mary to go with her; 
these friends of one were friends of both sis- 
ters, but she would not. 

“ Let every tub stand on its own bottom,” 
she had said laughing. “ Next year, perhaps, 
I shall make new plans — but I don’t know. 
I can’t go out of England till Tom has left 
Oxford, and I will not allow him to breakup 
his career because I cannot support loneli- 
ness, and my own thoughts.” 


140 


MV JO, JOHN. 


And Mamie had sighed, thinking that 
sometimes loneliness was better than an en- 
forced companionship with a tailor’s-dummy 
of a man, in the whole of whose well-propor- 
tioned body was a mind of such pigmy pro- 
portions that it could scarcely be dignified with 
the name of a mind at all. 

But a well-groomed appearance and a ca- 
ressing manner to every woman, including his 
wife, will carry a man triumphantly over shoals 
and quicksands into which the sincerely hon- 
est man sinks and is lost ; so Captain Dewar 
held his head up with the best, while John 
Anderson, his noble nature to all appearance 
irremediably wrecked, had, in the significant 
language of the world, accomplished that 
living death in life known as “ going un- 
der.” 

And to-day Mary’s heart, at first so stag- 
nant and then vaguely soothed by the petting 
and cheerful society of her sister, was fever- 
ishly wakening again to torment, and an 
omen of evil kept step with her as she walked 
affecting her with even a physical sense of 
coming misfortune. 

She tried to thrust it from her, asking what 


MY JO, JOHN. 14 1 

worse could befall her than had befallen 
already ? 

Tom was safe, she had just heard from him, 
and she had no one to care about but Tom 
now. 

Suddenly she stood still in the middle of 
the lane, its steep banks thickly clothed with 
fern, tufted with gorse, and capped with rich 
winter-berried thorn that seemed to mock a 
bush of holly, its fruit just changing from 
green to red, and lacking the vivid, audacious 
colouring of its neighbour. 

Holly . . . and in six weeks it would 

be Christmas Day . . . the first Christ- 

was Day for twenty years that she had not 
spent beside him. 

“ Peace on earth, goodwill towards men ” 

. . . . the words rang mournfully and ap- 

pealingly in her ears. What had she done ? 
oh ! what had she done ? 

Had she tried, with all her heart, soul and 
strength, to rescue her husband — had she not 
suffered temper, and pride, and the unfor- 
giveable slight to petty miserable self, to drag 
her from the path of duty, and leave him in 
the slough of his despair — alone ? 


142 


MY JO, JOHN. 


She had been ashamed of him — yes, 
ashamed. At Euston, it had seemed a slur 
on her taste that she could ever have loved, 
and married, and fretted herself to fiddle- 
string over such an unkempt, un-self-respect- 
ing creature ! 

She had been ashamed to say to Captain 
Dewar, “ That is my husband” ; but to-day, 
alone, face to face with the conscience that 
she had deliberately thrust into the back- 
ground all these months, she knew herself for 
a woman who had signally failed in her duty, 
and who had no right on her knees, or in a 
church, or anywhere with those noble souls, 
who forgave others their trespasses, even as 
they prayed God to be themselves forgiven. 

She stood still in the midst of a pearly 
mist that closed round her suddenly like a 
shroud, with a vivid sense of awful isolation, 
much as though she had been buried alive, 
and wakened to find herself alone, with the 
sound of once loyed footsteps and voices pass- 
ing over her head. . . . 

“ O! my dear,” she said, below her breath, 
“ for one touch of your hand or mouth, one 
moment with my arms round your neck 


My JO, JOHN. 


143 

. . . and you might be as shabby, and old, 

and miserable as you liked, I should love 
you, love you, love you, and in your heart you 
have loved me best, all along.” 

For a moment the fog lifted, and showed a 
timid hare skirting the hedgerow, hurrying 
round to her family, no doubt, as fast as she 
could go. 

“ That was what Mamie meant,” she went 
on, with a sudden change of thought, “ when 
she said that some men rubbed up their far- 
things to look like gold, and offered them to 
a woman, and others kept their pure gold so 
dull that it might pass for copper, but a wife 
got to know the real value of what a man gave 
her in time, she meant that the pure gold, 
all the gold of his life, was mine, and the 
glittering copper hers. And the outside of a 
man, his very name even, does not matter — 
it is the heart. That is the man. And no 
matter what my poor fellow may have done, 
what follies and errors he may have fallen in- 
to, he IS too good in the main to have strayed 
far from the right path, and I am going to 
look for you, John, to look for you, and find 


144 


MV JO, JOHN. 


She walked buoyantly on, unchilled by the 
clinging mist, so warm was the heart-fire 
within her, and Mary could walk quickly 
enough now, for restless days and sleepless 
nights had given back to her the figure of a 
girl, and into her face had come a new and 
spiritualised beauty that made her younger 
by ten years. 

“ I think I can understand it all now,” she 
said to herself, “ what a woman may be driven 
to . . . after all, the weakest man is 

stronger than the strongest woman — he is 
self-sufficient, he has no ill-health, no nerves 
(anybody could tell by the way women are 
made that Providence isn’t female ! ), while 
she, without him she is nothing. She has no 
one to think of, no one to provide for — and 
men are nothing but grown-up children, after 
all ! ” 

She went into the pretty, low house — in 
summer a bower of trellis-work and roses — 
with a light step, and found the rose-shaded 
lamps inviting and cheerful after the mist 
and loneliness without. 

A long figure rose from a lounging chair, 


MV JO, JOHN. 


145 

as she came in, and seized her in its arms — 
it was Tom. 

But even while he kissed her, she pushed 
him back with both hands, and looked in his 
face. 

“Your father she said, “you have 
brought me bad news ? ” 

The revulsion of feeling was too great, after 
the resolve of the past hour, and she would 
have fallen if he had not caught her. 

But she did not faint, strong- hearted women 
never do ; they only suffer agonies that the 
weak mercifully escape by unconsciousness, 
and in a few seconds she said : 

“Tell me." 

“ There is not much to tell, mother dar- 
ling,” said Tom pitifully, his own face telling 
far more than he knew ; “ only we can’t find 
father, and we are afraid ” 

“ That he is dead,” said Mary quietly, “ and, 
if so, I killed him.” 

“ I don’t believe he is dead for a moment,” 
said Tom energetically ; “ but we are afraid 
that he is living, somewhere on very narrow 
means.” 

“ Starving, you mean,” said Mary, throwing 
10 


MY JO, JOHN. 


146 

her costly cloak from her as if it burnt 
her. 

“ We hope not,” said Tom, gravely, “ but 
we have found out, Fletcher and I, and Mr. 
Goldsworthy has helped us a little, that at 
the time you and he separated, he was an 
entirely ruined man. All his private fortune 
was gone, and after you left, everything was 
sold at Harley Street, including the lease, 
and the money for that vanished like- 
wise.” 

“ But he had his half-pay ! ” cried Mary, 
whose mind was recoiling at the modest 
luxury in which she had lived during the last 
six months. 

“ That is gone too, or rather, he does not 
receive it. He has assigned it to his credi- 
tors.” 

“ What creditors ? ” said Mary. “ Do you 
mean Lady Blanche’s creditors ? ” 

“ No — his own. He seems to have specu- 
lated ruinously under Lady Blanche’s aus- 
pices, but curiously enough, only he was 
ruined, not her exceedingly smart ladyship.” 

“ John. . . . John ” ... said the poor 

woman, a moan breaking from the very 


MY JO, JOHN. 147 

depths of her heart, “ where are you ? Tom, 
Tom, we must go at once and find him ! ” 

“ Fletcher and I have been looking for 
weeks,” said Tom gravely. “ We have com- 
municated with the police, we have been to 
Scotland Yard, and everything short of ad- 
vertising him has been done. He would 
never forgive us for doing that, if — if — ” 
Tom hesitated, “ he is alive.” 

“ Oh, my God ! ” cried Mary, like a wild 
thing. “ It is all my doing. Mine — mine ! 
He was ruined, and I behaved like a brute to 
him, and he thought I knew it, and that was 
why I left him ! ” 

“ I am afraid that was so,” said Tom, sadly. 
“ Mr. Goldsworthy dropped a word or two to 
that effect, and you know how proud the poor 
old Dad was — he could never have borne to 
to live upon a woman.” 

“ Only that woman was his wife,” said 
Mary, in agony. “ I begin to understand 
now — and his lotter. O ! blind, blind ! ” 

She threw herself face downwards on the 
couch, trembling as if with ague, and Tom 
tried in vain to soothe her. 


148 


MY JO, JOHN. 


“ Homeless, hungry, alone ! ” she said 
« while / ” 

“ Mother,” said Tom, almost sternly, “you 
were not to blame. He did not tell you, and 
how could you know ? And his position with 
regard to Lady Blanche was equivocal enough 
to make any wife angry. Beast ! ” he ejacu- 
lated with extraordinary vigour. 

“ Who ” said Mary, lifting her pale face. 

“ Her ! She ! That woman. I went up 
to the North to see her. She denied herself 
to me. I insisted. She declined. I sat in 
the hall six hours, and wore her patience out 
at last. She told me insolently that she knew 
nothing whatever of my father’s movements.” 

“ Tom,” said Mary. “ What had she got 
on.?” 

“ I don’t know the colour, but next to noth- 
ing, as it was dinner-time.” 

“ And do you think her so handsome .? ” 

“ I think her a painted devil. Well, she 
swore she hadn’t seen or heard from father 
since August, when he spent a few days at 
the Castle. She scarcely hid her scorn of 
him as a brOken-down gentleman, who had 
bored her to extinction, and said insolently 


MV JO, JOHN. 


149 


that father had been impertinent enough to 
associate her with his separation from his 
wife, and she had never been mixed up in 
affairs of that kind, and did not mean to be 
now.” 

“ So his cosy corner was made cold to him,” 
said Mary, almost unconsciously. 

“ I told her straight that she and her cursed 
speculations had been the ruin of him,” went 
on Tom, “ and, that though I had always heard 
her spoken of as the ‘ decoy duck ’ I never knew 
how thoroughly applicable the term was to her, 
till I saw her. And I told her that the woman 
who went into the streets for a living was 
worth fifty such as she, who ruined and de- 
spoiled honest English gentlemen to pay for 
their luxuries and to buy jewels to hide their 
brazen nakedness. And then 1 walked out.” 

“Tom! Tom!'' 

“ And since then — but I have told you the 
rest.” 

“ I am coming with you, Tom,” said Mary, 
getting up and reaching for her cloak. “ Do 
you think I can eat, sleep, and drink here 
while ” 

“ What can you do, mother ” interrupted 


150 


MV JO, JOHN, 


Tom sadly. “You can’t dress yourself in 
rags and exploit the East End, as Fletcher 
is doing now.” 

“ The East End. That awful place you 
call Whitechapel 1 ” whispered Mary, in hor- 
ror-struck accents. 

“ Yes * Fletcher thinks he’s got a clue, 
and he’s following it up like a bull-dog. And 
Martha’s helping him ! ” he added, with a 
rueful attempt at a laugh. 

“ A clue ? ” said Mary, catching her breath, 
“ and when will you know if it’s a true one — 
to-night ? ” 

“ I hope so — but I doubt it.” 

Mary’s face was turned towards the win- 
dow, the blackness of which reflected the 
low couches, the flowers and the pictures in 
the room, reflected also Tom’s figure and hers, 
as they stood together. 

As she looked, something seemed to move 
between them, and she gripped Tom’s arm, 
pointing with her other to the window. 

“ There’s someone outside,” she said, in a 
voice entirely unlike her own, and in a second 
had dashed forward, and was tearing at the 
wood and glass to get it open. 


MV JO, JOHN. 


15 


“ John ! ” she said, springing out into the 
dark, after a dark something that eluded her. 

“ John ! ” 

No man could have resisted such a cry, 
and the figure came back, a thing in rags, and 
stood before her, the veriest scarecrow that 
ever appeared in a lady’s presence. 

“ Ma’am” it said, imploring. It was Fletcher. 

Mary laughed, with a laughter more dread- 
ful than any tears. She seized him by the 
arm and dragged him into the warm, fragrant 
room, and demanded of him his news. 

“ He is alive, ma’am,” said Fletcher, 
solemnly, “ and he is well.” 

“ Thank God! Thank God I ” and Mary’s 
grasp relaxed, and she stood alone. “ Tell 
me quick. Where is he? ” 

Fletcher shook his head. He was like the 
wraith of his respectable self, and yet he held 
his head up, and was his very self still, in all 
but appearance. 

“ That I have not found out yet, ma’am,” 
he said, “ but I know the neighbourhood he is 
in, and expect to find the exact house to-night 
or to-morrow.” 

Mary uttered a low moan of intense disap 


MV JO, JOHN. 


152 

pointment, much as a starving creature may, 
to whose lips bread is approached only to be 
snatched away. 

You followed up that clue we got yester- 
day ” said Tom, swiftly. 

“ Yes, Mister Tom. And last night, about 
seven o’clock, what seemed to be about his 
dinner-time, poor soul ! I saw him outside a 
dried-fish shop, looking in, and considering 
what he’d buy, and at last he bought two 
bloaters for a penny — bloaters for dinner. 
Master Tom — bloaters ! The woman treated 
him as if he was a prince, and wrapped them 
up very careful, and he put them in his pocket, 
and went on.” 

“Was he — was he wrapped up.^^” said 
Mary, thinking of the sharp frost of these 
early November nights. 

“ Not much,” said Fletcher, hesitatingly, 
“ but he was tidy, no rags, ma’am, and clean 
linen — you know he never forgot that if he 
did everything else, but his hat and boots 
was very shabby, and he walked a bit bowed 
like, as if he’d been sitting over his books a 
good while.” 

“ Go on,” said Mary, almost fiercely. 


My JO, JOHN. 


153 

“ Presently he stopped at a book-shop — 
seems wonderful -like they should have book- 
shops in Whitechapel — and he stops, and he 
takes up first one, then another, lovingly, 
just as ladies takes up their favourite flowers, 
and he fidgets about a bit, and he feels in 
his pocket, and his face brightens up, and in 
he goes, and without any haggling, for he 
never could haggle, he buys a book for six- 
pence, and comes out with it, looking almost 
happy.” 

O! that “ almost ! ” Mary winced again. 

“ Come, hurry up,” said Tom impatiently. 

“ And then he goes on again, into worse 
and worse neighbourhoods, that I wouldn’t 
have dared to tread on my own account ’less 
I’d been in rags, and I see people nudging 
one another to look at him, for you don’t see 
many gentlemen in these parts. But he’d 
no watch — there was nothing to steal, and 
he’d got that look in his face that the small- 
est child ’ud trust, and I knew he was safe 
enough, so I just followed on, and it seemed 
to me he was just going to stop at the mouth 
of a low alley, when he turned sharp round, 
and saw me.” Fletcher drew a deep breath, 


MV JO, JOHN. 


154 

and an expression of acute pain crossed his 
face. 

“ Before I could so much as speak, he 
waved me off quite wild- like. If he wasn’t 
such an abstanious gentleman, you’d have 
thought he’d been drinking, and ‘Fletcher,’ 
he says, ‘ I never sent for you — how dare you 
come spying after me ” 

“ I begged and implored him to listen to 
me, but he didn’t seem to hear, only says, 
‘ Go home, and don’t let me catch you here 
again ! What business have you in those 
rags.f^ Remember I left your mistress in 
your care, and I expect to be obeyed.’ There 
was that flash in his eye, I daredn’t stand up 
against it, so I just turned and went away, 
and then I made some enquiries — they took 
me a long time — but I’m pretty well sure I’ve 
found out the court he’s in — Slum Court it’s 
called — and I’m going into every house in it, 
on one pretext or other, to-night. And now 
I must be going, as it’s getting late.” 

Mary was calmer now, with a profound 
feeling that she might be happy perhaps, by- 
and-by. 

“ Tom,” she said, turning to him, “ take 


MV JO, JOHN, 


155 


me up to Town at once somewhere that 
Fletcher can come to, and tell us if he is 
found to-night.” 

Tom looked at his watch. 

“ There is a train in three-quarters of an 
hour,” he said. “ Is there anyone to har- 
ness the pony to the carriage ? ” 

“ I will,” said Fletcher, promptly, and was 
shortly recognized and welcomed by Mayfly, 
who like most animals was not to be con- 
fused in a personality by a mere change of 
clothes. 

“ You must eat something first, mother,” 
said Tom, as they crossed the hall to the 
dining-room, where the table was already 
laid for dinner, delicately bright with its 
glass and silver, and the autumn leaves that 
made a crimson wreath round the candelabra 
with its white shades. 

“ I am not hungry,” said Mary, looking 
straight before her, and seeing instead a bare 
board, with a crust and a bit of dried fish 
upon it. “ I have eaten too much and too 
long. I have eaten right through the time 
that he has starved ! ” 

She rang the bell and Polly came. 


156 


MV JO, JOHN, 


“ I am going to Town for a few days,” she 
said, “ put me up a hand-bag and a change 
of linen — quick.” 

- The pony carriage came round as if of its 
own accord just as the bag was ready. On 
going out, Mayfly was discovered in sole 
possession, and Polly stared as mother and 
son drove away. 

But outside the gate, a scarecrow jumped 
up behind, and went all the way as far as the 
railway station, where it once more miracu- 
lously disappeared. 

“ Fletcher,” said Mary, turning her head 
once, “ where is Martha ? ” 

“ In Whitechapel, ma’am, in a decent 
lodging, and very comfortable she has made 
it. She sent you her duty, and was sorry to 
be away so long.” 

Mary smiled into Tom’s face in the dark, 
and Tom grinned back. 


MV JO, JOHN, 


157 


CHAPTER XVL 

“ If a man perfectly righteous should come upon earth, he would 
find so much opposition in the world that he would be imprisoned, 
scourged, and in fine crucified, by such who, though very wicked, 
would yet pass for righteous men.” Plato. 

The tallow candle wanted snuffing, and 
John Anderson stretched his hand out for 
the snuffers. 

There were none, and he went on reading 
with difficulty, the light was so bad. But he 
persevered, perhaps because the page was so 
much pleasanter to look upon than the 
squalid room, with its dirty, unwashed floor, 
its bulging, discoloured walls, and a dismal 
ceiling that his head almost touched when he 
stood upright. 

A pallet, on which the linen was clean, a 
tub, a portmanteau that had seen better days, 
a jug and a basin, a saucepan, frying-pan and 
sooty kettle, with the chair and rude table at 
which he sat, completed the furniture of the 


MV JO, JOHN, 


158 

room. This being almost at the top of the 
house, no blind was required, and indeed the 
blackness of the night made one, though 
through the obscured glass no diamond 
points of starlight could shine. It was close 
on midnight, but the miserable place was 
alive with shouts and voices, and heavy steps 
that stumbled and pounded on the crazy 
stairs. The only quiet spot in it was this lit- 
tle room upstairs, and John’s privacy was not 
likely to be invaded, for, no matter what 
orgies or rows might be going forward, it 
was an understood thing that the “gentle- 
man was not to be disturbed.” 

So that he had no occasion to lock his 
door, and when presently it opened, he did 
not look up, supposing it would close again 
when the intruder discovered his mistake. 

But the steps came right up to the table 
where he sat, and a loving young voice cried. 
“ Dad and then choked as the tall, bent 
figure sprang up, and the two stood face to 
face. 

“ Father,” said Tom, all the colour in his 
handsome young face, and tears in his eyes. 
“ Oh ! father, how could you ? ” 


MV JO, JOHN. 


159 

For a moment John’s heartleaped, and the 
warmth of that young blood coursed through 
his veins as they gripped hands, then he 
drew himself up, and said proudly : 

“ And why are you here, Tom ? ” 

“ Why? ” said poor Tom. “ Did you think 
that because you deserted us, we were going 
to desert you } ” 

“ I never deserted your mother,” he said, 
coldly and firmly. “ She deserted me. When 
I had lost my fortune, when I stood most in 
need of love and sympathy — she left me. 
And I could not live on a woman — especially 
when she did not want me.” 

“ But she did not know,” cried Tom. “ She 
never knew a word of your losing any money 
until to-day. She thought that ” 

John made a gesture with his hand to com- 
mand silence. 

“ I do not know what she thought, I only 
know what she did. And she had wounded 
me deeply, Tom, long before that, by her 
railing, her jealousy, her whole conduct, so 
utterly unlike anything I had ever known in 
her before.” 


i6o 


MY JO, JOHN. 


“She was jealous, certainly, father,” said 
Tom, colouring, “ but ” 

“1 had given her no occasion,” said his 
father sternly, and indeed the past six months 
had clearly soured the usually sweet, frank 
temper. “ She might have trusted me, but 
she did not. She might have seen my trouble, 
but she would not. I may be blind, but I 
think I should have known if she had been 
going through such a mental crisis as I was 
going through then, and I think that I should 
have been — kinder.” 

“She has been broken-hearted, father,” 
said Tom under his breath, but his father 
caught it. 

he said, suddenly and sharply, “the 
woman who coldly and deliberately proposed a 
separation, who with sang-froid carried 

it out, and quietly removed herself, and home 
and income, from a ruined man, takes too 
much care of her own comfort to be a broken- 
hearted woman. I had ruined myself, and in 
a manner — by reflection — her, and she could 
not forgive me. She was tired of me. She 
had other views ” 

“ Views } ” ejaculated Tom, staring at his 


MY JO, JOHN. l6i 

father by the dim, miserable light. “ What 
do you mean ? ” 

“She spoke of marrying again, regretting 
that she could not get a divorce, and actually 
asked me to strike her, that she might do sq.” 
“ She was very sorry aftewards, sir,” 

“ I didn’t understand it then,” said John, 
whose pale face seemed to have dwindled to a 
point, while his dull eyes had that peculiarly 
hollow look belonging to privation and 
misery ; “but I did — after. Why, Tom, 
that man she was frisking with at Euston that 
night — I never saw the fellow before in my 
life — dressed up like a girl, and a fringe, 
Tom ; just think of it, at her age, and with a 
grown-up son. I saw directly that was why 
she had talked about getting a divorce, and 
he called her dear. Oh ! shameless ! ” 

He glanced downwards at the open book 
as if to calm himself with its philosophy, 
then went on quickly : 

“ I was anxious about her — women are 
such weak creatures, and she had always 
been taken such care of — and if you’ll 
believe me, one night in September I stole 
down to Pigeonwick, and I stood in her 


i 62 


MV JO, JOHN, 


garden like a thief, and looking like a beggar, 
and I heard them talking — your mother and 
that fellow — on the verandah. He said what 
' a pity it was she hadn’t a man who really 
loved her, to look after her and pet her, and 
she said in a hard voice, not like your mother’s, 
that she wished she had, and he said some- 
times people (meaning me) died, and then she 
could be happy. And then I came away, for 
I had heard quite enough.” 

“ Mamie must have been upstairs,” burst 
out Tom. “ Why, Dad, don’t you know who 
that fellow was.f^ Mamie’s husband, and 
mother’s brother-in-law.” 

John Anderson’s jaw dropped, he stood 
staring at Tom as at a total stranger. 

“ Mamie’s husband ! ” he repeated. “ Cap- 
tain Dewar ? ” 

“ Of course. You never saw him, you 
know, as Aunt Mamie was married in India.” 

John mechanically sat down at the table, 
but after a moment his face grew stern again. 
His hurt at Mary’s hand was too deep, it had 
bled inwardly too long, to be lightly healed, 
but it suddenly struck Tom as extraordinary 
how little stress his father laid on his ruin. 


JO, JOHN. 


163 


and his subsequent privations, so entirely was 
he engrossed with Mary and her conduct. 

“ Dad,” blurted out Tom, “how have you 
lived all these months } ” 

John passed his hand across his brow, as 
one who by an effort recalls distasteful things. 

“ There’s no excuse forme, Tom,” he said. 
“ I had no business speculating, but I got en- 
tangled — entangled. I don’t know how it 
was, but some wonderful big thing in which 
Lady Blanche and her husband expected to 
make a fortune, and in which I took shares, 
went wrong, and I found myself liable for a 
sum that only the realization of all my prop- 
erty, and even assignment of my half-pay for 
some years, would meet. Poor woman — 
she meant well no doubt, and she was kind 
and sympathetic at first, but afterwards, when 
I went over to Scotland, she entirely changed, 
and was very rude to me, so I came away.” 

“Beast!” said Tom, savagely; “but you 
haven’t told me, father, how you kept body 
and soul together.” 

“ Do you remember Cousin Tabitha, Tom, 
the poor little old governess who got past 
work, and to whom I made an allowance for 


164 


MV JO, JOHN, 


many years? Well, she came into a small 
fortune last spring, and wrote and told me. I 
wrote to her boldly, and asked her to send me 
£ 2 ^ a year for ‘ a distressed relation.’ She 
never guessed it was me, and sends it regularly. 
If she had failed, or died ” he paused. 

A slight sound at the door made them both 
glance at it, Tom apprehensively. Wider 
and wider it opened, and something sank 
down noiselessly across the threshold. 

Tom did not stir, only looked at his father, 
who looked back with a terrible, wild ques- 
tion in his eyes, then John Anderson strode 
across the room and stooping to that uncon- 
scious figure, bore it swiftly back in his long 
arms. 

How light it was, what a mere feather- 
weight, as he sat down in the crazy chair and 
looked at the face lying on his breast, deathly 
pale, with the dews of exhaustion pearling her 
brow. 

She could not say one word for herself, and 
a true woman, however wronged, never has a 
word to say for herself, but John read the 
story that her face told, and his soul yearned 
over her, and all the past burned up like a 


MY JO, JOHN'. 165 

scroll, and he felt the richest, happiest man in 
the whole world to-night. 

He smoothed the brown hair back from 
her face, uncut now, just as it used to be — the 
fringe, where was it } — and pressed his lips to 
her cheek, her tender mouth, her throat, call- 
ing her his little one, his Mary, never even 
seeing how Tom had slipped away, and they 
two were alone together. 

Out of the darkness, and pain, and misery, 
she opened her blue eyes on his face, and 
reaching out a timid arm, stole it round his 
neck. She was home now, safe, too happy 
yet to dare look her joy full in the face, but it 
was there. O, yes, it was there, and God 
surely would not be so cruel as to snatch it 
from her again. 

John, she said, when they had “ kissed again 
with tears,” “ why did you lock the dressing- 
room door that night when I was coming to 
ask you to make it up } ” 

“Were you coming.'^” said John, in a 
startled tone. 

“ Yes, I almost had my hand on the door 
when you suddenly turned the key.” 

“ I thought you had been asleep for hours,” 


i66 


JO, JOHN, 


said John, “and that you had shut the door 
as a sign to me that no appeal would alter 
your determination to leave me. And I was 
angry, Mary, as well as deeply hurt, and I 
think you were angry too.” 

Mary hung her head, but happiness dim- 
pled the corners of her lips, and laughed in 
her eyes. 

“ You used to say I was getting fat, John — 
it used to be the only fault you ever found in 
me, but I am not too fat now } ” 

John laughed, and made a real lover’s 
speech, and when Mary had twisted his mous- 
tachios and kissed the top of his head just 
where the hair grew thin they looked as happy 
a pair as you could wish to see. 

Then Mary, waking to the fact that the 
world was not contained in a sharp white 
face, lit by two kind eyes, looked round the 
room, shuddering. 

“ My poor boy,” she said, and then shud- 
dered again, took in every detail of the famine- 
haunted place, and burst out crying. 

“ And I have lain warm and soft,’’ she 
sobbed, “ in my little bright nest.” 

A discreet knock came at the door. 


MV JO, JOHN. 


167 

“ Come in,” said John, and Fletcher, clothed 
and in his right mind, stood in the aperture, 
while over his shoulder Martha’s rosy, smil- 
ing countenance peeped. 

“ The cab is at the door, sir, and I will 
follow you with the luggage.” 

“ Fletcher, you scoundrel,” said John, 
“ come here. So it was you tracked me out 
here, was it.f^” And John wrung his hand, 
while Martha made a bee-line for her mistress, 
and the two women wept and smiled to- 
gether. 

“ Your hat, sir,” said Fletcher, who had in 
some mysterious way brushed and made it 
respectable. 

“ My books ! ” said John Anderson, and 
Mary pinched his arm and laughed. 

“ I am afraid I have been a little extrava- 
gant,” he said humbly, “ but when it came to 
be a choice between a dinner and a book ” 

“ I say,” said Tom, putting his head in at 
the door, “ all Slum Court is waiting outside 
to see you off — Slum Court never goes to 
bed, I believe.” 

Mary beckoned to Tom, with a wistful feel- 
ing that he had been forgotten, left out in the 


MY JO, JOHN-. 


i68. 

cold, and they hugged each other with silent 
warmth. 

“ My boy,” said John, putting his hand on 
Tom’s shoulder, but Tom knew well enough 
how it was Mary — Mary, who filled his father’s 
heart to overflowing. 

And then in happy processipn they all went 
down the broken, evil-smelling stairs. 

A rough crowd surrounded the unwonted 
apparition of a cab in that quarter, but the 
words they spoke were not rough when John 
Anderson appeared with his wife. 

“ Gor bless him ! ” cried one hoarse voice ; 
“ he give me a meal often when he wanted 
one hisself.” 

“ He sot up all one night with me, and 
made gruel hissen,” said a woman’s feeble 
voice farther away. 

“ Never did no yallerin’ and preachin’, but 
helped everybody,” affirmed a man with a face 
like a bulldog. 

“Glad to see you, mum,” said a virago, 
who had apparently forgotten to clothe her- 
self when she stepped out to take the air, “ if 
ever a soul deserved a good missus, he do ” 

“ All right, cabby,” said Fletcher imper- 


My JO} JOHN. 


169 

turbably, but John checked him, and heartily 
shook the many hands thrust out to seize his. 

“ Good-bye, God bless you ! ” he said. 

“ Gord bless yer ! ” came the reply in a 
hoarse, eager shout. 

Be sure that the human heart beats every 
whit as strong and true in the East of Lon- 
don as in the West; and the benediction and 
its echoes seemed to follow the three as they 
drove away, perchance will follow them 
always, who knows .? to the end of their lives. 


THE END. 




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